The 1850's repeated the crises of the 1820's and 30's, but in a compressed time span and with more deadly consequences.
The post-Revolutionary generation in South Carolina faced the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that limited slavery in the west, the Denmark Vesey trial of 1822, and James Hamilton’s nullification threat of 1832.
The next generation had the Compromise of 1850 that included the Fugitive Slave Act and led to talk of nullification. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 left the question of slavery in the territories to the settlers, and led to guerilla war in Kansas.
In this atmosphere, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin and William Gilmore Simms serialized The Sword and the Distaff in the Southern Literary Gazette in 1852 . The one criticizes the inhumanity of slavery; the other anticipates the need for guerilla warfare and recalls the aftermath of the American revolution in South Carolina when, Simms said, "peace is only a name for civil war."
Simms’ intent, based on his title, had been to use a character based on Hezekiah Maham to describe the difficulties of reestablishing plantations after the war. However, as a writer, he was better at describing action than romance. The middle section that describes his hero’s courtship of a wealthy widow drags, while the opening description of highway robbery would excite the imagination of any adolescent boy. When the work was issued as a book, he renamed it Woodcraft.
Like any work of popular fiction of the time, the reader’s interest lay in events that crowded each installment. The characters were recognizable stereotypes. There was the hard-hearted widow who’d played both sides in the war; the Scots merchant villain who’d fenced stolen slaves; his agent, a double dealing squatter; an upright Christian youth who marries after the war but is willing to fight when called upon; the hero’s faithful slaves who hid in the swamp from the British and willingly returned to the fields under the orders of a man not much better than Simon Legree; and the innocent daughter of the squatter who marries the nice, but naive son of the widow.
Maham is changed into Porgy, an insouciant scion who has mortgaged his property "which had been transmitted to him through three or more careful generations" to support a life of alcoholic leisure. When the sheriff finally forecloses on the property, Porgy makes the deputy eat the paperwork. He’s saved through the intervention of Charles Coatesworth Pickney and the squatter’s deathbed confession.
While Porgy is recognizable as a type all too common in South Carolina at the time, he bears almost no resemblance to Maham. All the virtues of the latter have disappeared, and his negative traits exaggerated.
In reality, Maham was a self-made man who worked as an overseer before gaining his own land, not an indulged son like James Hamilton who was criticized in 1850 for supporting the congressional compromise because it might redeem some of his Texas debts and save him from ruin.
When Maham returned to his land he found new seed rice. Porgy’s plantation is taken over by Millhouse, a underling sergeant eager to reestablish traditional ways. He tells him "You was always a-thinking to do something better than other people, and you wouldn’t let nater [nature] alone."
At a time when tidal cultivation was being introduced by the more innovative planters, Millhouse adds "Now I’m a-thinking that the true way is to put the ground in order, and at the right time plant the seed, and then jest lie by, and look on, and see what the warm sun and rain’s guine to do for it."
He concludes his anti-innovation critique with "It ain’t reasonable to think that a man kin find new wisdom about everything"
During the war, Maham had perfected a tower for siege warfare.
The war had dwindled to the final evacuation by the British in Simms’ novel, and most of his allusions are to Francis Marion’s units in general. Maham’s bravery at Quinby Bridge is transferred to the incident of banditry that opens the novel when an outlaw shoots his horse. The incident when Maham started from sleep and believed he was under attack is turned into a joke on Millhouse who attacks a ghost.
The only specific recollections of military encounters are ones that advance Simms’ view of war as a series of harassments bordering on torture. One of Porgy’s slaves, Pomp, recalls a scrimmage with Fraser at Parker’s Ferry where the "cappin mounted a British officer," then ‘cut him clean through his skull to his chin." Porgy himself remembers "old Echars, the Dutchman, whom we dressed in tar and feathers at Moncks’ Corner, for stealing cattle."
According to Patrick O’Kelley, Marion left Maham in charge of unmounted men at Parker’s Ferry while he took other troops to attack. While the British were retreating, unmounted men surrounded Thomas Fraser’s troop of South Carolina loyalists and opened fire at 40 yards. After the battle, Marion returned with his prisoners to where he’d left Maham.
Monck’s Corner is more obscure, mentioned by only one man who wrote Maham "took upwards of eighty prisoners" in October of 1782, months after Maham had been paroled and two months before the defeated British evacuated Charles Town.
In Woodcraft, Porgy is a middle-aged bachelor who’s spent his life in the salons of Charleston, but has to no idea how to court a woman. Maham had been married twice and fathered two daughters. His wife died after he’d returned home from battle, but before he confronted the sheriff’s deputy.
Maham only appears in histories as an actor in events, not as a person important enough to have a portrait painted and passed through generations or one who appears in diaries and journals of society life. His physical appearance and habits are unknown.
Simms makes Porgy so fat he can’t dismount his horse, and worries his trousers will split in company. He’s a heavy drinker who surrounds himself with the detritis of war, the one-armed Millhouse, and the most degenerate forms of the Enlightenment’s arts and sciences, the fraudulent Doctor Oakenburg and George Dennison, "poet of the partisans."
What we know of Hezekiah Maham comes from histories by Frederick Porcher and Joseph Johnson, both born after Mahan died. Parson Weems’ account of Francis Marion’s war effort was based on notes by Maham’s rival, Peter Horry, and never mentions Maham; Marion is given credit for the tower.
It could well be the widowed survivor of war did become the man described by Simms. His great-nephew, Joshua John Ward, however, heard through the family, he had been much more.
Unfortunately, his virtues were held in contempt by the generation going into the civil war, who only praised the most atrocious actions as necessary in war and condemned anyone else as decadent as Porgy.
Notes:
Johnson, Joseph. Traditions and Reminiscences, Chiefly of the American Revolution in the South, 1851.
O’Kelley, Patrick. Nothing but Blood and Slaughter: The Revolutionary War in the Carolinas, 4 volumes, 2004-2005.
Porcher, Frederick A. Historical and Social Sketch of Craven County, no date.
Simms, William Gilmore. Woodcraft, 1852, republished 1961 with an introduction by Richmond Croom Beatty.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Attacks on the Rational
Sometimes I think the defense of slavery has been as pernicious as slavery itself, if for no other reason than it discourages logical thinking.
Charleston in the years after the revolution included plantation owners willing to experiment with new technology. By the time of the nullification crisis around 1830 innovators still existed, but they weren’t respected for their efforts. Slaves, not machines, were the only answer for economic challenges.
Scientific thinking posits the sanctity of facts, and assumes scientists will change their theories when those theories no longer can explain observed reality. Thomas Kuhn showed men don’t always live up to that ideal, that when they’re confronted with anomalies they propose more and more absurd solutions to sustain their basic beliefs. However, he also showed that over time, the value of experience does alter theory, the underlying value holds.
One cannot support scientific thinking if one is so wedded to a practice like slavery that no contrary facts can be admitted. Once facts cannot be recognized, then they must be explained away, turned into something that supports the overarching theory. Bending reality becomes acceptable.
Today, we have people who deny the observed realities of climate change because the proposed explanation threatens some part of their world view. For some, it’s the idea that nature isn’t as rigid as suggested by Genesis. For others, it’s the concept of human responsibility and the consequences for accountability for one’s actions that’s troubling. And, of course, there are those who see an economic threat.
The result is an attack on science itself.
Recently, Mary Beard reviewed a book by Donald Kagan which she saw as attacking Thucydides for praising the behavior of Pericles in the Peloponnesian war which Kagan thinks is like that of those who wouldn’t put more resources into winning the war in Viet Nam. Since Kagan believes those actions led to unnecessary defeat, so Pericles must be redefined as leading his country to disaster.
The result is an attack on the academy itself which tries to sift evidence to develop explanations. When certain conclusions are forbidden, reality must be subverted.
Since the protests against the Vietnam war, discrimination against Blacks and abortion in the late 1960's, we have seen a growing number of people who cannot accept the validity of criticism of any kind. If schools needed to change to fit social ideals, then education must be rejected. And so, a generation developed who rejected the very tools they needed to survive in the changing economy.
Now the economy is in crisis and those who’ve been left behind are the most vehement in protesting any policy that might prevent further or repeated problems, simply because the people who propose those solutions are associated with other ideas that are unacceptable. The basic thinking seems to be, if you have the wrong idea about abortion, then you can’t be trusted with the money supply.
The final result has been an attack on the constitution itself, which distributes power among groups in the population. Since those left behind cannot change, then the constitution must be reinterpreted. The tools that come to hand are those developed by men in the south who defended slavery - nullification and the primacy of minority rights.
Elections are no longer legitimate if the wrong man wins.
Notes:
Beard, Mary. "Which Thucydides Can You Trust?," The New York Review of Books, 30 September 2010, on Donald Kagan’s Thucydides: The Reinvention of History.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.
Charleston in the years after the revolution included plantation owners willing to experiment with new technology. By the time of the nullification crisis around 1830 innovators still existed, but they weren’t respected for their efforts. Slaves, not machines, were the only answer for economic challenges.
Scientific thinking posits the sanctity of facts, and assumes scientists will change their theories when those theories no longer can explain observed reality. Thomas Kuhn showed men don’t always live up to that ideal, that when they’re confronted with anomalies they propose more and more absurd solutions to sustain their basic beliefs. However, he also showed that over time, the value of experience does alter theory, the underlying value holds.
One cannot support scientific thinking if one is so wedded to a practice like slavery that no contrary facts can be admitted. Once facts cannot be recognized, then they must be explained away, turned into something that supports the overarching theory. Bending reality becomes acceptable.
Today, we have people who deny the observed realities of climate change because the proposed explanation threatens some part of their world view. For some, it’s the idea that nature isn’t as rigid as suggested by Genesis. For others, it’s the concept of human responsibility and the consequences for accountability for one’s actions that’s troubling. And, of course, there are those who see an economic threat.
The result is an attack on science itself.
Recently, Mary Beard reviewed a book by Donald Kagan which she saw as attacking Thucydides for praising the behavior of Pericles in the Peloponnesian war which Kagan thinks is like that of those who wouldn’t put more resources into winning the war in Viet Nam. Since Kagan believes those actions led to unnecessary defeat, so Pericles must be redefined as leading his country to disaster.
The result is an attack on the academy itself which tries to sift evidence to develop explanations. When certain conclusions are forbidden, reality must be subverted.
Since the protests against the Vietnam war, discrimination against Blacks and abortion in the late 1960's, we have seen a growing number of people who cannot accept the validity of criticism of any kind. If schools needed to change to fit social ideals, then education must be rejected. And so, a generation developed who rejected the very tools they needed to survive in the changing economy.
Now the economy is in crisis and those who’ve been left behind are the most vehement in protesting any policy that might prevent further or repeated problems, simply because the people who propose those solutions are associated with other ideas that are unacceptable. The basic thinking seems to be, if you have the wrong idea about abortion, then you can’t be trusted with the money supply.
The final result has been an attack on the constitution itself, which distributes power among groups in the population. Since those left behind cannot change, then the constitution must be reinterpreted. The tools that come to hand are those developed by men in the south who defended slavery - nullification and the primacy of minority rights.
Elections are no longer legitimate if the wrong man wins.
Notes:
Beard, Mary. "Which Thucydides Can You Trust?," The New York Review of Books, 30 September 2010, on Donald Kagan’s Thucydides: The Reinvention of History.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.
Sunday, December 05, 2010
Food Stamps - Part 4
The biggest requirements for living on $39 a month for food are resourcefulness and a willingness to think in non-traditional ways.
My boss’s former tenant’s first thought was the familiar pinto beans. Mine was lentils and rice. I’ve seen people in the local store filling their cart when eggs were on sale for $.68 a dozen and discussed the problems of keeping peanut butter from spoiling with an older woman.
To do well, one has to go beyond what one knows, without the benefit of the internet or books or even friends.
I don’t like pinto beans, but, if forced to eat them, I would probably spend time trying to find out how to make them taste better, not with fancy spices, but by figuring out the best ratio of water to beans. I would do this because I know it took me some time to learn to cook rice, and I remember both what I did and that I succeeded.
However, I would need a clock or timer, which might be a luxury.
One would have to be willing to look at items on sale or at low prices and consider them. That was what brought my attention to the citrus punch, a pile of cartons in the aisle with an advertised special low price. When I looked at the ingredients, I realized it wasn’t the best, but might work in a tight situation.
I remember how horrified people were years ago when they heard the elderly sometimes ate dog food. I went to the pet aisle to see if the seniors might have been right. The cheapest can of dog food is $.69 and lists more nutrients than the Spam substitute that costs $2.00, the potted meat that costs $.59 and the Vienna sausages that also cost $.59.
Likewise cat food isn’t a bad choice, if you mask the smell, taste and texture. Three small cans with tuna flavoring cost a dollar and list more nutrients than a can of tuna that costs $.89. After all it has to keep an animal alive, while the tuna is only considered part of a human’s diet.
Resourcefulness isn’t the monopoly of any social class. When I asked friends how they would solve this dietary puzzle, they essentially dismissed it out of hand as impossible. They wouldn’t even speculate.
I was too polite to ask them how they think they would have survived rationing in World War II or the destruction of Sarajevo, events that touched the middle classes as much as the poor. Modern life may have removed most of us from the threat of famine that existed before modern agriculture, but natural disasters and wars always threaten to return us to that fragile world where 800 calories of dried food is a luxury.
Our renter is more resourceful than they because she’s already spending her time scouring second hand sources within walking distance. They would have to overcome their cultural pride first, then learn where to shop.
Food stamps may not signify any freedom to live without constantly thinking about one’s stomach, but they may engender more freedom to think creatively about survival. I suspect many, however, would prefer the freedom to have an extra serving without thinking about the end of the month.
Freedom from want is not the same as freedom from wanting.
My boss’s former tenant’s first thought was the familiar pinto beans. Mine was lentils and rice. I’ve seen people in the local store filling their cart when eggs were on sale for $.68 a dozen and discussed the problems of keeping peanut butter from spoiling with an older woman.
To do well, one has to go beyond what one knows, without the benefit of the internet or books or even friends.
I don’t like pinto beans, but, if forced to eat them, I would probably spend time trying to find out how to make them taste better, not with fancy spices, but by figuring out the best ratio of water to beans. I would do this because I know it took me some time to learn to cook rice, and I remember both what I did and that I succeeded.
However, I would need a clock or timer, which might be a luxury.
One would have to be willing to look at items on sale or at low prices and consider them. That was what brought my attention to the citrus punch, a pile of cartons in the aisle with an advertised special low price. When I looked at the ingredients, I realized it wasn’t the best, but might work in a tight situation.
I remember how horrified people were years ago when they heard the elderly sometimes ate dog food. I went to the pet aisle to see if the seniors might have been right. The cheapest can of dog food is $.69 and lists more nutrients than the Spam substitute that costs $2.00, the potted meat that costs $.59 and the Vienna sausages that also cost $.59.
Likewise cat food isn’t a bad choice, if you mask the smell, taste and texture. Three small cans with tuna flavoring cost a dollar and list more nutrients than a can of tuna that costs $.89. After all it has to keep an animal alive, while the tuna is only considered part of a human’s diet.
Resourcefulness isn’t the monopoly of any social class. When I asked friends how they would solve this dietary puzzle, they essentially dismissed it out of hand as impossible. They wouldn’t even speculate.
I was too polite to ask them how they think they would have survived rationing in World War II or the destruction of Sarajevo, events that touched the middle classes as much as the poor. Modern life may have removed most of us from the threat of famine that existed before modern agriculture, but natural disasters and wars always threaten to return us to that fragile world where 800 calories of dried food is a luxury.
Our renter is more resourceful than they because she’s already spending her time scouring second hand sources within walking distance. They would have to overcome their cultural pride first, then learn where to shop.
Food stamps may not signify any freedom to live without constantly thinking about one’s stomach, but they may engender more freedom to think creatively about survival. I suspect many, however, would prefer the freedom to have an extra serving without thinking about the end of the month.
Freedom from want is not the same as freedom from wanting.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Food Stamps - Part 3
Living on the food stamp allotment of our renter carries many requirements, both physical and mental.
The first, and most obvious, is a stove, or at least a burner. After we asked the women to move because her rent was greater than her disability check and it became obvious she had no other income sources, she moved into one of the old motels that have been converted into efficiency apartments. The only unit available came with a microwave and bar refrigerator, but no stove.
She’s on a waiting list again and her rent will increase when a unit with a stove becomes available.
The last time I talked with her, my boss’s former tenant was searching second hand stores for a hotplate. Until then, she can’t cook her pinto beans.
For a dollar a day, she will have to eat things that require no cooking. A bag of dry cereal costs $3.00, a half jar of peanut butter is $1.00 and bread is $.88 a loaf. If she ate a third of a bag of cereal a day without milk, it would add 720 calories to the 410 she would get from peanut butter and bread.
Microwavable food isn’t an alternative. A pot pie cost $.89 in the local store, but only contains 390 calories. The cheapest frozen dinners are $1.25 and contain 260 to 280 calories. You need at least 1,000 a day to lose weight safely. 2,000 calories are recommended for most adults.
The bar refrigerator is adequate for left overs, although you can only make a couple days worth of pinto beans at a time without risking spoilage. Eggs, margarine, the citrus punch, even peanut butter, would all be fine. However, freezing food is impossible.
The choices I made for $39 a month require a larger pot for soaking and cooking beans or potatoes, and a smaller one with a lid for everything else. A frying pan is usually necessary to cook eggs. Some kind of flat metal is useful for warming bread over the burner: a toaster is a luxury. Beyond that, the woman needs a long handled serving spoon to stir the beans, a spatula for the eggs, a sharp knife to cut potatoes and avocados, a dull knife to spread peanut butter, a plate or bowl, a glass, and a fork or spoon to eat with.
One of the most critical things is a measuring cup. Although you only need to worry about proportions if you’re fussy about how your rice is cooked, you need to faithfully measure out each day’s portion of pinto beans, rice and lentils if you want them to last the time expected. That, in turn, assumes the first of the mental requirements: the ability to plan ahead and discipline oneself. Too many would eat too much too soon in the month and hope providence would provide.
The basic arithmetic requires both addition and division to divide $39 by 4 weeks. Planning for the inevitable 5-week month requires more math. Of course, one wants to end each month with nothing left on the card, and the surplus dry foods horded.
Buying the healthiest choices, and not living on pinto beans, wheat tortillas, and eggs, is trickier. Package labeling is difficult, and misleading. For instance, egg cartons carry no information. Protein isn’t mentioned on many but thiamin is, suggesting the latter is more important.
How does one sort through the deliberately obscure ingredients to know dextrose is sugar and if all forms of sodium are salt? How do you judge the benefits of what’s essentially sugar water with a dollop of juice and vitamins? How does one know riboflavin is good for you or the characteristics of potassium benzoate?
The woman is in her 50's. Even if she learned some of this in school, that was many years ago and much has changed. Xanthan gum was approved in 1968. I certainly have no idea what the food pyramid is supposed to tell me. It was invented after I graduated from high school in 1962. It was only in the late 60's that I learned protein wasn’t a simple ingredient, but required complementing sources, and that knowledge only came from a chance encounter, not much different than my meetings with our tenant.
The first, and most obvious, is a stove, or at least a burner. After we asked the women to move because her rent was greater than her disability check and it became obvious she had no other income sources, she moved into one of the old motels that have been converted into efficiency apartments. The only unit available came with a microwave and bar refrigerator, but no stove.
She’s on a waiting list again and her rent will increase when a unit with a stove becomes available.
The last time I talked with her, my boss’s former tenant was searching second hand stores for a hotplate. Until then, she can’t cook her pinto beans.
For a dollar a day, she will have to eat things that require no cooking. A bag of dry cereal costs $3.00, a half jar of peanut butter is $1.00 and bread is $.88 a loaf. If she ate a third of a bag of cereal a day without milk, it would add 720 calories to the 410 she would get from peanut butter and bread.
Microwavable food isn’t an alternative. A pot pie cost $.89 in the local store, but only contains 390 calories. The cheapest frozen dinners are $1.25 and contain 260 to 280 calories. You need at least 1,000 a day to lose weight safely. 2,000 calories are recommended for most adults.
The bar refrigerator is adequate for left overs, although you can only make a couple days worth of pinto beans at a time without risking spoilage. Eggs, margarine, the citrus punch, even peanut butter, would all be fine. However, freezing food is impossible.
The choices I made for $39 a month require a larger pot for soaking and cooking beans or potatoes, and a smaller one with a lid for everything else. A frying pan is usually necessary to cook eggs. Some kind of flat metal is useful for warming bread over the burner: a toaster is a luxury. Beyond that, the woman needs a long handled serving spoon to stir the beans, a spatula for the eggs, a sharp knife to cut potatoes and avocados, a dull knife to spread peanut butter, a plate or bowl, a glass, and a fork or spoon to eat with.
One of the most critical things is a measuring cup. Although you only need to worry about proportions if you’re fussy about how your rice is cooked, you need to faithfully measure out each day’s portion of pinto beans, rice and lentils if you want them to last the time expected. That, in turn, assumes the first of the mental requirements: the ability to plan ahead and discipline oneself. Too many would eat too much too soon in the month and hope providence would provide.
The basic arithmetic requires both addition and division to divide $39 by 4 weeks. Planning for the inevitable 5-week month requires more math. Of course, one wants to end each month with nothing left on the card, and the surplus dry foods horded.
Buying the healthiest choices, and not living on pinto beans, wheat tortillas, and eggs, is trickier. Package labeling is difficult, and misleading. For instance, egg cartons carry no information. Protein isn’t mentioned on many but thiamin is, suggesting the latter is more important.
How does one sort through the deliberately obscure ingredients to know dextrose is sugar and if all forms of sodium are salt? How do you judge the benefits of what’s essentially sugar water with a dollop of juice and vitamins? How does one know riboflavin is good for you or the characteristics of potassium benzoate?
The woman is in her 50's. Even if she learned some of this in school, that was many years ago and much has changed. Xanthan gum was approved in 1968. I certainly have no idea what the food pyramid is supposed to tell me. It was invented after I graduated from high school in 1962. It was only in the late 60's that I learned protein wasn’t a simple ingredient, but required complementing sources, and that knowledge only came from a chance encounter, not much different than my meetings with our tenant.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Food Stamps - Part 2
It’s possible to eat on a $39 a month food stamp allotment, but it’s only possible to do so for a short time and remain healthy.
It isn’t just the lack of calories and nutrients that’s a problem. The diet I devised is one that no diabetic could eat. In addition to the obvious sources of carbohydrates, there’s corn syrup in the citrus punch and white bread, while cheap peanut butter has another form of sugar, dextrose.
If one substituted eggs for the punch, one would add cholesterol: 62% of the daily need, based on 2,000 calories. The canned vegetables are as bad for their high sodium content. The avocado and margarine contain saturated fats.
This is a diet that could lead to obesity, heart problems and diabetes. The limited calcium and vitamin D could add bone density problems for thin women. Without the vitamin C in the citrus punch and the wide range of vitamins and minerals in the potatoes, one would be worse off.
In addition, what nutrients there are in the diet are expensive. The 128-ounce citrus punch is only 1% fruit juice. 57 ounces of regular orange juice has been on sales for months for $3.49 and is more juice. The one cost $1.50 more, but the price for ounce of juice is less.
Likewise, the cheapest peanut butter is cut with cotton seed or canola oil, which increases the actual price for the peanuts.
The other hidden price is psychological. One would spend half the day preparing food and would probably be thinking about it much of the time. If a television was broadcasting images meant to make one hungry, the cravings to eat would be worse. It’s no fun walking through a grocery store hungry without enough money.
Pinto beans aren’t just the diet of the ancestors here. They also require the lifestyle: they have to soak for eight hours and cook for four. One would have to put them in water before going to bed. While the cooking time can be shortened with a pressure cooker or lengthened with a crock pot to make it possible for someone to work, I assume such appliances aren’t available to someone living of such limited means.
The cooking time makes it impossible to have an 8-hour job, unless one gets up in the middle of the night to start the beans to cook and immediately refrigerates them for dinner or eats them for breakfast.
Lentils and rice take about 45 minutes to cook, while potatoes take at least 25 minutes to boil.
The woman is probably wrong to think the government thinks she can live on $39 a month. Food stamps are supposed to supplement income that also would include money for food. But, if there is no extra money, if one thinks like she does, then one is thrown farther back in economic times, from the time of pinto beans and subsistence agriculture, to the life of the hunter-gatherer.
To supplement this diet, one would need to search out local food banks and places that provide free meals, and hope one could qualify. Again, scavenging precludes the ability to hold a job, although an evangelistic Christian center near her house periodically advertises free food in the evenings, at the price, I suppose, of a sermon.
So, now I know the price of pinto beans, but I’m not sure I know the full costs for a child whose tastes are formed by an inadequate food stamp assignment. I can see what a treat it would be to go into a fast food restaurant and order a sandwich that contains an entire day’s calories on a single bun and leave feeling really full.
It isn’t just the lack of calories and nutrients that’s a problem. The diet I devised is one that no diabetic could eat. In addition to the obvious sources of carbohydrates, there’s corn syrup in the citrus punch and white bread, while cheap peanut butter has another form of sugar, dextrose.
If one substituted eggs for the punch, one would add cholesterol: 62% of the daily need, based on 2,000 calories. The canned vegetables are as bad for their high sodium content. The avocado and margarine contain saturated fats.
This is a diet that could lead to obesity, heart problems and diabetes. The limited calcium and vitamin D could add bone density problems for thin women. Without the vitamin C in the citrus punch and the wide range of vitamins and minerals in the potatoes, one would be worse off.
In addition, what nutrients there are in the diet are expensive. The 128-ounce citrus punch is only 1% fruit juice. 57 ounces of regular orange juice has been on sales for months for $3.49 and is more juice. The one cost $1.50 more, but the price for ounce of juice is less.
Likewise, the cheapest peanut butter is cut with cotton seed or canola oil, which increases the actual price for the peanuts.
The other hidden price is psychological. One would spend half the day preparing food and would probably be thinking about it much of the time. If a television was broadcasting images meant to make one hungry, the cravings to eat would be worse. It’s no fun walking through a grocery store hungry without enough money.
Pinto beans aren’t just the diet of the ancestors here. They also require the lifestyle: they have to soak for eight hours and cook for four. One would have to put them in water before going to bed. While the cooking time can be shortened with a pressure cooker or lengthened with a crock pot to make it possible for someone to work, I assume such appliances aren’t available to someone living of such limited means.
The cooking time makes it impossible to have an 8-hour job, unless one gets up in the middle of the night to start the beans to cook and immediately refrigerates them for dinner or eats them for breakfast.
Lentils and rice take about 45 minutes to cook, while potatoes take at least 25 minutes to boil.
The woman is probably wrong to think the government thinks she can live on $39 a month. Food stamps are supposed to supplement income that also would include money for food. But, if there is no extra money, if one thinks like she does, then one is thrown farther back in economic times, from the time of pinto beans and subsistence agriculture, to the life of the hunter-gatherer.
To supplement this diet, one would need to search out local food banks and places that provide free meals, and hope one could qualify. Again, scavenging precludes the ability to hold a job, although an evangelistic Christian center near her house periodically advertises free food in the evenings, at the price, I suppose, of a sermon.
So, now I know the price of pinto beans, but I’m not sure I know the full costs for a child whose tastes are formed by an inadequate food stamp assignment. I can see what a treat it would be to go into a fast food restaurant and order a sandwich that contains an entire day’s calories on a single bun and leave feeling really full.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Food Stamps - Part 1
Do you know the price of pinto beans?
Of course, I don’t. I don’t like them, and pass the open cartons without a glance when I’m in the produce aisle of the grocery that caters to local folks.
The question only came up when I was talking to a woman who was complaining that her food stamp allocation had been cut to $39 dollars and she wanted to know how you eat on that with the high price of pinto beans.
Since an individual’s food stamp account in New Mexico is updated once a month, I assume she was asking how do you live on $9.75 a week, $8.75 if you set aside some for five week months.
The next time I was in the local store, I checked the price. A pound of beans is $.69 and contains 12.5 servings, each a quarter cup before soaking. If one reverted to the staple diet of the region for centuries and bought a package of corn tortillas at 30 for $1.18, one would have nutritious, if boring, meals for a week.
However, judging from the quantities in the store, more people buy wheat tortillas, which are also larger. However, wheat lacks the essential proteins found in corn treated with lye, and is less nutritious with beans.
One could double the amount of pinto beans, and eat them twice a day. Instead, I would buy a bag of lentils and a bag of white rice for $1.72. I know brown rice is better, but it wasn’t available in the grocery which caters to local poor people. Like corn treated with lime and pinto beans, the two are complementary proteins.
I would also buy a five pound bag of potatoes and make it last two weeks for a cost $1.00 a week. The cheapest stick margarine was $.23 a stick, and should last a week to flavor the potato, if I was careful.
My total purchase would be $4.82 for the week. It provides 800 calories. The suggested daily intake is 2000, with 1000 the minimum for safely losing weight.
If I wanted to set aside a dollar for that five week month, I still have $3.93 to spend. People here would probably buy eggs, avocados and some kind of dried or fresh chili. When the price of each is spread out over two weeks, they cost about $3.00.
An alternative is peanut butter and white bread, another pair of complementing proteins, which would cost $1.88 a week. Again, I know wheat bread is better, but the cheapest costs $.20 more a loaf and doesn’t appear to have any more nutrients than the enriched white. Brown bread isn’t necessarily whole grain.
Since I have a limited tolerance for both eggs and peanut butter, I would probably buy a gallon of the cheapest citrus punch and possibly some avocados and canned tomato sauce to flavor the pinto beans. The first cost $2.00 a gallon and has 90 calories a serving; small avocados were being sold for 3 for $1.00 when I looked and have 227 calories; tins of tomato sauce containing 3.5 servings are $.33 and 20 calories each.
I considered canned vegetables which sell for 3 for $2.00, or $4.00 for six days. Each can is supposed to hold 3.5 servings, but it would difficult to store the left overs - this budget doesn’t allow for such luxuries as plastic wrap or aluminum foil. I could eat the whole can, even though it would contain 50% of my daily salt requirement, if I were actually eating 2000 calories. After all a can of peas would add 245 calories, corn 280, and green beans 70.
Any remaining money could also be used to buy black pepper ($2.50 for a large can) to spice the bland lentils and pinto beans, or permit more margarine on the potatoes.
Choosing the citrus punch with pinto beans, potatoes, lentils and rice, avocados and tomato sauce, my daily caloric intake would be just over 1,000. I would have 74% of the protein for an adult woman (adult men require more), but 163% of the necessary vitamin C and 132% of the fiber. Based on the recommended 2,000 calories, I would also have 19% of my sodium, 27% of my calcium, 69% of my iron, and average 15 to 25% of other necessary vitamins and trace minerals.
I could make it, but it would take a while for my stomach to adjust. It would be harder on the woman who posed the question; she weighs more than I.
Of course, I don’t. I don’t like them, and pass the open cartons without a glance when I’m in the produce aisle of the grocery that caters to local folks.
The question only came up when I was talking to a woman who was complaining that her food stamp allocation had been cut to $39 dollars and she wanted to know how you eat on that with the high price of pinto beans.
Since an individual’s food stamp account in New Mexico is updated once a month, I assume she was asking how do you live on $9.75 a week, $8.75 if you set aside some for five week months.
The next time I was in the local store, I checked the price. A pound of beans is $.69 and contains 12.5 servings, each a quarter cup before soaking. If one reverted to the staple diet of the region for centuries and bought a package of corn tortillas at 30 for $1.18, one would have nutritious, if boring, meals for a week.
However, judging from the quantities in the store, more people buy wheat tortillas, which are also larger. However, wheat lacks the essential proteins found in corn treated with lye, and is less nutritious with beans.
One could double the amount of pinto beans, and eat them twice a day. Instead, I would buy a bag of lentils and a bag of white rice for $1.72. I know brown rice is better, but it wasn’t available in the grocery which caters to local poor people. Like corn treated with lime and pinto beans, the two are complementary proteins.
I would also buy a five pound bag of potatoes and make it last two weeks for a cost $1.00 a week. The cheapest stick margarine was $.23 a stick, and should last a week to flavor the potato, if I was careful.
My total purchase would be $4.82 for the week. It provides 800 calories. The suggested daily intake is 2000, with 1000 the minimum for safely losing weight.
If I wanted to set aside a dollar for that five week month, I still have $3.93 to spend. People here would probably buy eggs, avocados and some kind of dried or fresh chili. When the price of each is spread out over two weeks, they cost about $3.00.
An alternative is peanut butter and white bread, another pair of complementing proteins, which would cost $1.88 a week. Again, I know wheat bread is better, but the cheapest costs $.20 more a loaf and doesn’t appear to have any more nutrients than the enriched white. Brown bread isn’t necessarily whole grain.
Since I have a limited tolerance for both eggs and peanut butter, I would probably buy a gallon of the cheapest citrus punch and possibly some avocados and canned tomato sauce to flavor the pinto beans. The first cost $2.00 a gallon and has 90 calories a serving; small avocados were being sold for 3 for $1.00 when I looked and have 227 calories; tins of tomato sauce containing 3.5 servings are $.33 and 20 calories each.
I considered canned vegetables which sell for 3 for $2.00, or $4.00 for six days. Each can is supposed to hold 3.5 servings, but it would difficult to store the left overs - this budget doesn’t allow for such luxuries as plastic wrap or aluminum foil. I could eat the whole can, even though it would contain 50% of my daily salt requirement, if I were actually eating 2000 calories. After all a can of peas would add 245 calories, corn 280, and green beans 70.
Any remaining money could also be used to buy black pepper ($2.50 for a large can) to spice the bland lentils and pinto beans, or permit more margarine on the potatoes.
Choosing the citrus punch with pinto beans, potatoes, lentils and rice, avocados and tomato sauce, my daily caloric intake would be just over 1,000. I would have 74% of the protein for an adult woman (adult men require more), but 163% of the necessary vitamin C and 132% of the fiber. Based on the recommended 2,000 calories, I would also have 19% of my sodium, 27% of my calcium, 69% of my iron, and average 15 to 25% of other necessary vitamins and trace minerals.
I could make it, but it would take a while for my stomach to adjust. It would be harder on the woman who posed the question; she weighs more than I.
Sunday, November 07, 2010
The Sheriff Won
More than a thousand people last Tuesday refused to vote for sheriff, nearly 10% of the Democratic voters.
I can tell you it wasn’t easy not to vote for him. The easiest thing to do was vote party line, which at least 6,800 might have done.
For various reasons the Republican candidate for governor drew more votes than usual. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate attracted 1,500 fewer votes than the man running for the Congressional district who got more than 8,300 votes.
If one split one’s ticket, it was easiest to vote for offices that mattered, the ones with two candidates, and skip the ones like sheriff with only a single candidate. Many skip the oddly worded judicial votes (do you favor keeping so and so in office) which are not part of the party line option.
To vote against the sheriff one had to stand at the card board podium and tediously ink in the circle for every other unopposed candidate, no matter how trivial sounding the post. That was the only way a voter could register a protest in the disparity in the final vote tallies.
Members of the sheriff’s department have found other methods. At least two have already left since the primary to work for the city police. In October, the outgoing sheriff recommended promoting a number of his allies within the department, a move approved by one of the new sheriff’s rivals just before the election. Other deputies are threatening to sue.
The elections may be over, but the legitimacy of the sheriff isn’t settled.
Unofficial results
Congressman - 11,404 votes cast - 8,369 D and 3,035 R
Governor - 11,510 votes cast - 6,822 D and 4,688 R
Sheriff - 7,267 votes cast, 1,102 less than the most popular D, 445 more than least popular D
I can tell you it wasn’t easy not to vote for him. The easiest thing to do was vote party line, which at least 6,800 might have done.
For various reasons the Republican candidate for governor drew more votes than usual. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate attracted 1,500 fewer votes than the man running for the Congressional district who got more than 8,300 votes.
If one split one’s ticket, it was easiest to vote for offices that mattered, the ones with two candidates, and skip the ones like sheriff with only a single candidate. Many skip the oddly worded judicial votes (do you favor keeping so and so in office) which are not part of the party line option.
To vote against the sheriff one had to stand at the card board podium and tediously ink in the circle for every other unopposed candidate, no matter how trivial sounding the post. That was the only way a voter could register a protest in the disparity in the final vote tallies.
Members of the sheriff’s department have found other methods. At least two have already left since the primary to work for the city police. In October, the outgoing sheriff recommended promoting a number of his allies within the department, a move approved by one of the new sheriff’s rivals just before the election. Other deputies are threatening to sue.
The elections may be over, but the legitimacy of the sheriff isn’t settled.
Unofficial results
Congressman - 11,404 votes cast - 8,369 D and 3,035 R
Governor - 11,510 votes cast - 6,822 D and 4,688 R
Sheriff - 7,267 votes cast, 1,102 less than the most popular D, 445 more than least popular D
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Bad Choices
This election year seems worse than usual in forcing voters to choose between unpalatable candidates. There seem any number of races where one’s political preferences preclude voting for the individual from one party, and the other person is so bad it’s morally debasing to vote for him or her. South Carolina, Delaware, Illinois, New York have made the headlines, but the ethical dilemma is everywhere at every level.
I live in a one-party county and our bad race is sheriff. The current man was prevented from running by term limits. Seven men ran in the Democratic primary in June, none in the Republican. The man who won earned 26% of the 8,135 votes cast. There are no run-offs.
Local newspapers provide no help. They said all the candidates had serious legal problems, but didn’t elaborate. Why they feel it cute to be coy I don’t know. No one trusts the newspapers or other local news media.
I gather the man I voted for had been convicted of state tax evasion, which I assume means our onerous and impossible to understand state gross receipts tax. I was pretty sure from my one contact with him through his business that he was incapable of managing a small office that depended on responding to emergency phone calls, and would have no ability to run two that are understaffed with 20 deputies protecting more than 40,500 people scattered over more than 5,000 square miles where heroin, cocaine and alcohol abuse are endemic.
I voted for him because my neighbor had his sign in his front yard. I wanted to vote for the man who had the best chance of defeating the one man I didn’t want to win. My choice came in second with 1,304 votes. Two others attracted similar numbers of voters.
The man I didn’t want to win was removed from his position as a Magistrate Court judge for corruption. He had personally released a friend arrested for drunk driving from jail. He was also accused of intervening in a domestic violence dispute by telling the woman she didn’t need to appear in court, even though she had been served with a subpoena.
Last spring his son was accused of theft by the owner of a local tattoo parlor. The next night his brothers went to the business to rough him up. Before the trial, all the witness’s statements were lost by the state police.
He got his office in the first place through his wife, who is the area’s state representative and the daughter of a politically powerful man.
There were no good choices running for sheriff. There are so many reports of violence, theft and general bad behavior by the deputies, I sometimes wonder if there are any decent men working in the office at all. One candidate was a former deputy had been arrested when he was young for drunk driving, and another had been investigated for protecting someone from a drunk driving charge.
The local state and city officers are no better. The candidate I opposed was investigated for fixing traffic tickets when he was a sergeant with the state police, and another was discharged for stealing evidence. Another was fired by the city police for unprofessional conduct and hired by the county, while one of the brothers involved in the tattoo incident worked as a city policeman at the time.
The problem isn’t simply our sheriff’s department. One learns to survive by avoiding any contact with them and assuming there will be no help in an emergency. Law and order depends of the values of one’s neighbors. There is no protection against gangs or intimidation.
The problem is what happens to a democracy when voters have no opportunity to choose between two good candidates. Even if one disagrees with them both, one likes to think they are at least qualified.
Instead, the act of voting has descended from picking the least bad option to playing odds on who can best prevent the worst outcome.
This leads to greater voter anger and apathy than any actions by politicians. Political parties that can’t field qualified candidates demonstrate contempt for the government they proport to represent.
With no opposition this Tuesday, I can at least abstain from voting for the man for sheriff. If the other party were running someone, I would face a serious problem - not of voting my convictions, but again of calculating the odds. Citizens should not have to ask themselves, is it safe to take a principled stand against corruption or must they vote no matter how reprehensible the outcome.
I live in a one-party county and our bad race is sheriff. The current man was prevented from running by term limits. Seven men ran in the Democratic primary in June, none in the Republican. The man who won earned 26% of the 8,135 votes cast. There are no run-offs.
Local newspapers provide no help. They said all the candidates had serious legal problems, but didn’t elaborate. Why they feel it cute to be coy I don’t know. No one trusts the newspapers or other local news media.
I gather the man I voted for had been convicted of state tax evasion, which I assume means our onerous and impossible to understand state gross receipts tax. I was pretty sure from my one contact with him through his business that he was incapable of managing a small office that depended on responding to emergency phone calls, and would have no ability to run two that are understaffed with 20 deputies protecting more than 40,500 people scattered over more than 5,000 square miles where heroin, cocaine and alcohol abuse are endemic.
I voted for him because my neighbor had his sign in his front yard. I wanted to vote for the man who had the best chance of defeating the one man I didn’t want to win. My choice came in second with 1,304 votes. Two others attracted similar numbers of voters.
The man I didn’t want to win was removed from his position as a Magistrate Court judge for corruption. He had personally released a friend arrested for drunk driving from jail. He was also accused of intervening in a domestic violence dispute by telling the woman she didn’t need to appear in court, even though she had been served with a subpoena.
Last spring his son was accused of theft by the owner of a local tattoo parlor. The next night his brothers went to the business to rough him up. Before the trial, all the witness’s statements were lost by the state police.
He got his office in the first place through his wife, who is the area’s state representative and the daughter of a politically powerful man.
There were no good choices running for sheriff. There are so many reports of violence, theft and general bad behavior by the deputies, I sometimes wonder if there are any decent men working in the office at all. One candidate was a former deputy had been arrested when he was young for drunk driving, and another had been investigated for protecting someone from a drunk driving charge.
The local state and city officers are no better. The candidate I opposed was investigated for fixing traffic tickets when he was a sergeant with the state police, and another was discharged for stealing evidence. Another was fired by the city police for unprofessional conduct and hired by the county, while one of the brothers involved in the tattoo incident worked as a city policeman at the time.
The problem isn’t simply our sheriff’s department. One learns to survive by avoiding any contact with them and assuming there will be no help in an emergency. Law and order depends of the values of one’s neighbors. There is no protection against gangs or intimidation.
The problem is what happens to a democracy when voters have no opportunity to choose between two good candidates. Even if one disagrees with them both, one likes to think they are at least qualified.
Instead, the act of voting has descended from picking the least bad option to playing odds on who can best prevent the worst outcome.
This leads to greater voter anger and apathy than any actions by politicians. Political parties that can’t field qualified candidates demonstrate contempt for the government they proport to represent.
With no opposition this Tuesday, I can at least abstain from voting for the man for sheriff. If the other party were running someone, I would face a serious problem - not of voting my convictions, but again of calculating the odds. Citizens should not have to ask themselves, is it safe to take a principled stand against corruption or must they vote no matter how reprehensible the outcome.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Cheap Media - A Screed
William Randolph Hearst knew it - control of cheap media gives you power. Why can’t the left remember this clear lesson?
When FM radio gave better music production in the 1960's, the young and hip changed their dials. AM remained, often relying on all-news and talk shows. When laws changed, and the ownership of AM radio stations consolidated, programs like those of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck expanded their audience. Those without the money to buy FM radios heard only one side.
When cable appeared, the young and hip changed their habits. Network TV remained for those who couldn’t afford the monthly fees. Fox defined itself as a network and was there.
Then, came digital TV, and some of us have been left with nothing, but radio. Limbaugh and Beck are still there.
Now, just as an important election is approaching, websites seem to be upgrading their technology, leaving those of us with older machines behind. Pages take longer to load, even locking up my machine. Ads cover stories, locking up my machine.
There are sites I’ve abandoned - sight obscuring ads drove me away from Salon and The Nation, registration drove me away from the New Republic and the Washington Post, locking machines threaten Salon and The Daily Beast, bad internet transfers force me out of Slate and Huffington Post.
What makes the owners of liberal websites thing advertisers like General Motors or General Electric Money really care if they destroy their web site so long as they get their message out for a few seconds. What makes them think rivals like the New York Times or The Economist really care if they survive? Don’t they think it worth while to hire someone, even in India, to constantly monitor their sites on all platforms?
Don’t they realize they’re as captivated by the market philosophy that says they’ve finally succeeded when they make money as those who brought on the mortgage crisis? That they’re no different than those who wanted to stay with an idea only until they sold the patent or issued an IPO, didn’t think it worthwhile to actually build something?
When given the choice of money or audience, they’ve been trained to think the first is the real affirmation of value.
And, then they wonder why conservatives are more effective at reaching the disenfranchised.
Even if the Drudge Report is also loading slowly and Fox is feuding with cheap cable networks, there’s still radio and Beck and Limbaugh to explain it all to the unhappy whose marginality is defined by the poor media they can afford.
If you want power, you don’t try to unify the bickering choir, you reach out to the apostate where ever they reside.
When FM radio gave better music production in the 1960's, the young and hip changed their dials. AM remained, often relying on all-news and talk shows. When laws changed, and the ownership of AM radio stations consolidated, programs like those of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck expanded their audience. Those without the money to buy FM radios heard only one side.
When cable appeared, the young and hip changed their habits. Network TV remained for those who couldn’t afford the monthly fees. Fox defined itself as a network and was there.
Then, came digital TV, and some of us have been left with nothing, but radio. Limbaugh and Beck are still there.
Now, just as an important election is approaching, websites seem to be upgrading their technology, leaving those of us with older machines behind. Pages take longer to load, even locking up my machine. Ads cover stories, locking up my machine.
There are sites I’ve abandoned - sight obscuring ads drove me away from Salon and The Nation, registration drove me away from the New Republic and the Washington Post, locking machines threaten Salon and The Daily Beast, bad internet transfers force me out of Slate and Huffington Post.
What makes the owners of liberal websites thing advertisers like General Motors or General Electric Money really care if they destroy their web site so long as they get their message out for a few seconds. What makes them think rivals like the New York Times or The Economist really care if they survive? Don’t they think it worth while to hire someone, even in India, to constantly monitor their sites on all platforms?
Don’t they realize they’re as captivated by the market philosophy that says they’ve finally succeeded when they make money as those who brought on the mortgage crisis? That they’re no different than those who wanted to stay with an idea only until they sold the patent or issued an IPO, didn’t think it worthwhile to actually build something?
When given the choice of money or audience, they’ve been trained to think the first is the real affirmation of value.
And, then they wonder why conservatives are more effective at reaching the disenfranchised.
Even if the Drudge Report is also loading slowly and Fox is feuding with cheap cable networks, there’s still radio and Beck and Limbaugh to explain it all to the unhappy whose marginality is defined by the poor media they can afford.
If you want power, you don’t try to unify the bickering choir, you reach out to the apostate where ever they reside.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Milli Vanilli in Brighton
One of the most uncomfortable hours I’ve ever spent occurred in Brighton, Michigan, in the late 1980's.
I was taking ballet classes there. Most of the students were local high school students. The assistant instructor, a dance major at the University of Michigan, wanted us to wear costumes to class on Halloween. When I didn’t, I was derided and so wore my sweats for class.
I was startled when two girls showed up dressed like hoboes in black face.
I learned from those admiring their costumes that they were supposed to be Milli Vanilli, two European-born break dancers who had some hit songs at the time. A few months later, in January 1990, they were criticized for not actually singing on their records, but simply acting as a stage presence for others.
I was shocked. No one seemed to think black face was the least bit offensive.
I looked for an exit. I didn’t want to confront them. After all, they had probably picked these costumes because they admired the way the men moved. Dancers can be particularly myopic when movement is involved.
But, I wondered, what were their mothers thinking who must have helped them apply the make-up. It wasn’t simple dark make-up, like a white would use on stage to play a Black. It was minstrel show black face.
I wondered, did they wear these costumes to school, or simply spend that much time on make-up for a dance class? If they were in school, where was the teacher or administrator who should have taken them aside, explained the realities of modern social life, and asked them to wash their faces.
What about the college student leading the class? She was so interested in celebrating Halloween, she abandoned the standard center floor work for conga lines and other forms of free expression.
I knew about the area support for the Ku Klux Klan; the local dragon, Robert Miles, was still alive. I’d seen survivalists out on weekend exercises when I drove down some county roads. Weren’t any of the adults they met at all aware of what they were seeing?
I got increasingly angry, both from by my sense of helplessness in the face of innocent bigotry and at the way the teacher was conducting the class. More and more, I wanted to walk out in protest, but was restrained by my inbred manners.
However, I soon stopped taking classes in Brighton.
I was taking ballet classes there. Most of the students were local high school students. The assistant instructor, a dance major at the University of Michigan, wanted us to wear costumes to class on Halloween. When I didn’t, I was derided and so wore my sweats for class.
I was startled when two girls showed up dressed like hoboes in black face.
I learned from those admiring their costumes that they were supposed to be Milli Vanilli, two European-born break dancers who had some hit songs at the time. A few months later, in January 1990, they were criticized for not actually singing on their records, but simply acting as a stage presence for others.
I was shocked. No one seemed to think black face was the least bit offensive.
I looked for an exit. I didn’t want to confront them. After all, they had probably picked these costumes because they admired the way the men moved. Dancers can be particularly myopic when movement is involved.
But, I wondered, what were their mothers thinking who must have helped them apply the make-up. It wasn’t simple dark make-up, like a white would use on stage to play a Black. It was minstrel show black face.
I wondered, did they wear these costumes to school, or simply spend that much time on make-up for a dance class? If they were in school, where was the teacher or administrator who should have taken them aside, explained the realities of modern social life, and asked them to wash their faces.
What about the college student leading the class? She was so interested in celebrating Halloween, she abandoned the standard center floor work for conga lines and other forms of free expression.
I knew about the area support for the Ku Klux Klan; the local dragon, Robert Miles, was still alive. I’d seen survivalists out on weekend exercises when I drove down some county roads. Weren’t any of the adults they met at all aware of what they were seeing?
I got increasingly angry, both from by my sense of helplessness in the face of innocent bigotry and at the way the teacher was conducting the class. More and more, I wanted to walk out in protest, but was restrained by my inbred manners.
However, I soon stopped taking classes in Brighton.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Joe Klein - Right
Joe Klein recently interviewed nine people in Brighton, Michigan, whose mortgages were greater than the current values of their homes.
They were mainly people dependent on municipal budgets for their income (fire fighters, policemen, emergency response workers, lawyers) and they were angry that people they knew were able to benefit from the system when they could not or would not.
Such people have been squeezed from the right for years. When cities grew, some more vocal taxpayers were unwilling to subsidize the growth. They talked about economies of scale, which meant when a community doubled in size, area or population density, the number of people who provided essential services could not double.
People had to do more work for wages that were constantly under public attack.
When people cannot alter the pressures from above, they take solace from the gradations of status that separate them from others below. They only know the rich live in Grosse Pointe and send their children to ivy-league colleges; they don’t see the differences the wealthier do between different addresses or between Yale on the one hand, and Dartmouth on the other.
The differences they see are the ones that separate those making it from those living on the edge of poverty. They could buy their homes, not rent. They could eat meat without depending on food stamps. They could occasionally provide their families with small luxuries.
These status gradations have been under attack from the left, as government programs that provided safety nets tried to do so without stigma.
The anger they expressed to Klein arose from the elimination of such status markers. One person, a lawyer, was angry at a neighbor who used a scheduled layoff as the excuse to apply successfully for mortgage relief. She complained: "It was like she got a raise. She bought her kids a swing set."
When I checked Walmart’s website, simple metal swing sets begin at $129 and nicer wooden ones start at $249 and increase quickly. When I lived near Brighton, you shopped at Meijer’s Thrifty Acres. Their website advertises a metal set with some features of the wooden ones for $139.
A hundred dollars is half a day’s pay, before taxes, if you make $25 an hour.
A cheap swing set is a luxury for a family with a mortgage. A fancy one would indeed arouse the envy and anger Klein heard.
The important point Klein is reporting is that people have not just been squeezed by the economy. They’re also losing their sense of themselves when their social markers are destroyed.
Mortgages are the clearest example, because these people know when their neighbors walk away and banks foreclose, they, not the banks, are the ones who suffer when their homes lose value. Another of his sources, a deputy fire chief, said "It’s immoral," but isn’t punished. He added:
"You've got to figure that our parents wouldn't have walked away from a mortgage. I'm not walking away from mine. But people I know well, friends, are taking a hike, and I wonder, What has happened to us as people?"
What indeed, when a man squeezed by the economy loses whatever remains that makes him feel important?
He can’t see or influence the institutions or special interests who’ve been destroying the economy, but he does see the others every day, the ones who benefit from government programs intended to help. The loss they cause is personal.
Notes:
Klein, Joe. "On the Road: Underwater in Detroit," posted on Time website 16 September 2010; there were ten at the meeting.
They were mainly people dependent on municipal budgets for their income (fire fighters, policemen, emergency response workers, lawyers) and they were angry that people they knew were able to benefit from the system when they could not or would not.
Such people have been squeezed from the right for years. When cities grew, some more vocal taxpayers were unwilling to subsidize the growth. They talked about economies of scale, which meant when a community doubled in size, area or population density, the number of people who provided essential services could not double.
People had to do more work for wages that were constantly under public attack.
When people cannot alter the pressures from above, they take solace from the gradations of status that separate them from others below. They only know the rich live in Grosse Pointe and send their children to ivy-league colleges; they don’t see the differences the wealthier do between different addresses or between Yale on the one hand, and Dartmouth on the other.
The differences they see are the ones that separate those making it from those living on the edge of poverty. They could buy their homes, not rent. They could eat meat without depending on food stamps. They could occasionally provide their families with small luxuries.
These status gradations have been under attack from the left, as government programs that provided safety nets tried to do so without stigma.
The anger they expressed to Klein arose from the elimination of such status markers. One person, a lawyer, was angry at a neighbor who used a scheduled layoff as the excuse to apply successfully for mortgage relief. She complained: "It was like she got a raise. She bought her kids a swing set."
When I checked Walmart’s website, simple metal swing sets begin at $129 and nicer wooden ones start at $249 and increase quickly. When I lived near Brighton, you shopped at Meijer’s Thrifty Acres. Their website advertises a metal set with some features of the wooden ones for $139.
A hundred dollars is half a day’s pay, before taxes, if you make $25 an hour.
A cheap swing set is a luxury for a family with a mortgage. A fancy one would indeed arouse the envy and anger Klein heard.
The important point Klein is reporting is that people have not just been squeezed by the economy. They’re also losing their sense of themselves when their social markers are destroyed.
Mortgages are the clearest example, because these people know when their neighbors walk away and banks foreclose, they, not the banks, are the ones who suffer when their homes lose value. Another of his sources, a deputy fire chief, said "It’s immoral," but isn’t punished. He added:
"You've got to figure that our parents wouldn't have walked away from a mortgage. I'm not walking away from mine. But people I know well, friends, are taking a hike, and I wonder, What has happened to us as people?"
What indeed, when a man squeezed by the economy loses whatever remains that makes him feel important?
He can’t see or influence the institutions or special interests who’ve been destroying the economy, but he does see the others every day, the ones who benefit from government programs intended to help. The loss they cause is personal.
Notes:
Klein, Joe. "On the Road: Underwater in Detroit," posted on Time website 16 September 2010; there were ten at the meeting.
Sunday, October 03, 2010
Joe Klein - Wrong
Every once in a while, someone will write something that calls into question his or her credibility as a reporter. Joe Klein had such a moment with a September 16 blog entry that Time headlined "On the Road: Underwater in Detroit."
The article was drawn from a conversation with ten people he met in a restaurant in Brighton, described as a Detroit exurb, 40 miles from the city.
The Detroit metropolitan area is usually considered to include the city and Wayne County, along with Macomb County to the north, used by political reporters to represent auto workers, and Oakland County to the northwest, home of the more affluent.
Brighton’s in Livingston County.
When Michigan was settled, people moved to the best lands for farming. Roads and railroads followed, and with them more economic development. The state had been covered by glaciers that left moraines and swamps. Places like Livingston County were avoided as too rocky or wet.
It’s more representative of the under developed areas that exist between major metropolitan areas. It lies on the road from Detroit to Lansing, the capital and home of Oldsmobile. Similar land lies between Detroit and Flint to the north, between Detroit and Toledo to the south, and Detroit and Battle Creek to the west.
Bad lands have always nurtured malcontents. Livingston County was the home of Robert Miles, grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. The modern militia movement thrives in Livingston County along with Lenawee County to the south and Jackson County to the west.
The opinions of people from such areas are important to understand, but they should not be considered representative of places like Detroit suffering from deindustrialization. They are from areas that never accepted large factories, even when they had them.
Not only were Klein’s sources not from the Detroit geographic area, only one was associated with industry: John McGraw, described as "the former president of a small division of a power-tool company that was closed down by its European owners." He lives in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, and was not at the meeting in Brighton. Klein met him separately.
The rest were "cops, firefighters, emergency responders and a few lawyers." These people could be found in any small town, suburb or city in the country. They represent the middling class in nineteenth century small town life displaced by factory towns. Even when they live in large cities, they do not inhabit the industrial world signified by the word "Detroit."
Klein was traveling cross country to learn more about the roots of the Tea Party anger. The success of his trip depended on the quality of the people who arranged his interviews. This one was done by Kevin Gentry, a "deputy fire chief and adjunct law professor at Michigan State" who practices law in Brighton.
The problem with Klein’s piece isn’t the sources or what he reports; it’s the context he provides, the repetition of the word Detroit in the first two paragraphs. The comments may well represent the views of people in Detroit or the auto industry, but they are not part of world he visited, and Klein doesn’t provide any quotes from such people to confirm that their experiences are shared.
Indeed, the only people he quoted were the former executive, a lawyer and a deputy police chief. If any of the people he met were commoners, or if any of them had opinions, we don’t know what they were. If they had differing views, they may not have expressed them in this gathering.
It was the job of Klein, or the people prepping him for these interviews, to learn more about the sociology of the area he was visiting.
The unwary reader could finish the article with a wrong impression.
For those like me, who grew up in areas that bordered one of the badlands or lived near Brighton for several years, the failure to know simple facts about the community is the failure that plants a seed of doubt about Klein’s reliability.
One may dismiss this as quibbling over details, but details are the very thing we use to judge reporters.
Notes: An Anti-Defamation League website lists events sponsored in 2010 by the Lenawee Militia, the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia in Brighton, and a neo-Nazi group, Battalion 14, in Jackson.
The article was drawn from a conversation with ten people he met in a restaurant in Brighton, described as a Detroit exurb, 40 miles from the city.
The Detroit metropolitan area is usually considered to include the city and Wayne County, along with Macomb County to the north, used by political reporters to represent auto workers, and Oakland County to the northwest, home of the more affluent.
Brighton’s in Livingston County.
When Michigan was settled, people moved to the best lands for farming. Roads and railroads followed, and with them more economic development. The state had been covered by glaciers that left moraines and swamps. Places like Livingston County were avoided as too rocky or wet.
It’s more representative of the under developed areas that exist between major metropolitan areas. It lies on the road from Detroit to Lansing, the capital and home of Oldsmobile. Similar land lies between Detroit and Flint to the north, between Detroit and Toledo to the south, and Detroit and Battle Creek to the west.
Bad lands have always nurtured malcontents. Livingston County was the home of Robert Miles, grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. The modern militia movement thrives in Livingston County along with Lenawee County to the south and Jackson County to the west.
The opinions of people from such areas are important to understand, but they should not be considered representative of places like Detroit suffering from deindustrialization. They are from areas that never accepted large factories, even when they had them.
Not only were Klein’s sources not from the Detroit geographic area, only one was associated with industry: John McGraw, described as "the former president of a small division of a power-tool company that was closed down by its European owners." He lives in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, and was not at the meeting in Brighton. Klein met him separately.
The rest were "cops, firefighters, emergency responders and a few lawyers." These people could be found in any small town, suburb or city in the country. They represent the middling class in nineteenth century small town life displaced by factory towns. Even when they live in large cities, they do not inhabit the industrial world signified by the word "Detroit."
Klein was traveling cross country to learn more about the roots of the Tea Party anger. The success of his trip depended on the quality of the people who arranged his interviews. This one was done by Kevin Gentry, a "deputy fire chief and adjunct law professor at Michigan State" who practices law in Brighton.
The problem with Klein’s piece isn’t the sources or what he reports; it’s the context he provides, the repetition of the word Detroit in the first two paragraphs. The comments may well represent the views of people in Detroit or the auto industry, but they are not part of world he visited, and Klein doesn’t provide any quotes from such people to confirm that their experiences are shared.
Indeed, the only people he quoted were the former executive, a lawyer and a deputy police chief. If any of the people he met were commoners, or if any of them had opinions, we don’t know what they were. If they had differing views, they may not have expressed them in this gathering.
It was the job of Klein, or the people prepping him for these interviews, to learn more about the sociology of the area he was visiting.
The unwary reader could finish the article with a wrong impression.
For those like me, who grew up in areas that bordered one of the badlands or lived near Brighton for several years, the failure to know simple facts about the community is the failure that plants a seed of doubt about Klein’s reliability.
One may dismiss this as quibbling over details, but details are the very thing we use to judge reporters.
Notes: An Anti-Defamation League website lists events sponsored in 2010 by the Lenawee Militia, the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia in Brighton, and a neo-Nazi group, Battalion 14, in Jackson.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
South Carolina - Innovation's Losers
There are none more bitter than those who see their peers or relatives do better than they, especially when those successes are rooted in something they cannot or will not do. In South Carolina, the spirit of innovation and trained observation were not universal and the willingness to work was discouraged.
The constant possibility of failure in the face of uncontrollable conditions makes people superstitious. When repetition doesn’t lead to success, the answer is often symbolic repetition. Agricultural peoples are among the most susceptible when their crops are subject to the vagaries of weather and plagues. When religion and reason preclude superstitious rituals, other more secular outlets are found to assert control over fate.
Growing rice was always risky. When the crop failed there was no income but prices were high for those who managed to harvest something. When the crop flourished, prices fell from surpluses and no one made much profit. The good years, when both the crop and price were good, were rare.
People who first succeed because they could think innovatively are sometimes able to adapt to changes more quickly than those who struggled to succeed or who always copy others and face failure by repetition with minor variations hoping to correct what they had done wrong.
None knew better than Nathaniel Heyward the need to keep changing. He had always preferred newly imported slaves. When Congress banned the importation of new slaves beginning the first of January, 1808, he and others had to confront the changed supply and cost of labor.
Peter Colclanis shows that rice planters did, indeed, adapt by improving per capita yields. The number of slaves in the low country dropped .5% between 1820 and 1830, but the production per individual increased from 241.85 pounds in 1820 to 377.53 in 1830.
When new slaves with usable skills were no longer available, planters turned to technology. Robert Allston found patents for hulling rice appeared sporadically from 1809 and increased in the 1820's, while new applications for threshers began in 1828 and culminated in a workable machine in 1830.
Unfortunately, Colclanis also shows that prices fell after the end of the Napoleonic wars in Europe. Exports from Charleston in 1818 had been worth 11 million dollars but fell to 8 million in 1819, and stayed between 7 and 8 million for most of the decade. They only rose to 11 million again in 1825, then hit that value again in the 1830's before falling to the 7-8 million range in the 1840's.
South Carolina responded to the labor and market crises by forbidding the manumission of slaves in 1820. Although the enforcement of the law varied, the population of freedmen in the low country dropped .9% in the 1820's. While there’s no clear evidence the General Assembly granted freedom to Philip Noisette’s wife and children when he died in 1835, they seem to have been left alone.
Similarly, when Plowden Weston, a merchant who had immigrated in 1757, died in 1827 he requested two of his slaves, Lydia and Anthony, be treated as freemen. The later was a millwright, who had improved the yield of a threshing machine by 1,000 bushels a day. Although his freedom wasn’t acknowledged by the state, Weston’s executors followed his wishes and let Anthony control his time.
Even so, the suspicion of freedmen grew after 1820 and culminated in the trial of Denmark Vesey in 1822. James Hamilton was intendant of Charleston when John Prioleau and John Lyde Wilson reported rumors of a slave insurrection. Hamilton appointed two judges and five jurors, including Nathaniel Heyward and William Drayton, to investigate.
After 34 men had been hung, the governor, who owned three of the executed, argued the deliberations violated the law. The attorney general, Robert Young Hayne, disagreed. Wilson, Hayne, Drayton and Hamilton all exploited their enhanced reputations for political gain, culminating in the nullification crisis of 1832.
In a small society like the Carolina low country, it was inevitable the planters would become more related with each generation. What’s interesting is that, unlike the ones who ordered mills from Jonathan Lucas who had led lives that showed they could adapt to changing circumstances, the ones who supported Hamilton were the children of the siblings who had not pioneered introducing technology into the rice fields.
Of the grandchildren of William Allston and Esther LaBruce, one, William Alston ordered a mill from Lucas, and two married men who worked with Lucas, John Bowman and Andrew Johnston. The daughters of their other son married Wilson and Hayne and did not order mills.
Among the Mottes, only Jacob’s wife, Rebecca Brewton raised daughters who were willing to invest in untried technology. Jacob’s sisters married more conventionally: Sarah was the
grandmother of Hamilton’s uncle, Thomas Lynch; Hannah was Hamilton’s grandmother, and Sarah was the mother of Hamilton’s law partner, William Drayton. Sarah’s daughter, Hannah, married Heyward’s brother William, and their daughter married the younger Drayton; they may be the ones who ridiculed Heyward when he was a young man visiting Charleston.
When faced with the problem of a more expensive labor supply, some, like Weston, responded creatively by finding ways to use their workers more effectively, and others, like Hamilton, attacked those who criticized slavery in any way. Still others, like Nathaniel Heyward, tried both.
The governor, Thomas Bennett, was not the only political opponent to have his slaves investigated. One of the banished men, Charles Drayton, was the property of William’s second cousin, John Drayton. The former governor was the son of William Henry Drayton who had rebelled against his William Bull grandfather during the revolution, while William’s father had followed the Bulls to England after the fall of Charleston.
Two slaves belonging to Jonathan Lucas’ son, Bram Lucas and Richard Lucas, were held before they were acquitted. The younger Jonathan Lucas left the country later that year, and began building mills for England, thereby hastening the loss of Carolina rice’s hegemony in world markets, a loss already foreshadowed by the lower prices.
Notes: See postings on James Hamilton and Denmark Vesey from 10 January 2010 through 7 March 2010.
Allston, William and Esther La Bruce
++ Esther marry Archibald Johnston
Andrew Johnston marry Sarah Eliot McKewn
++ Elizabeth marry Thomas Lynch
Sabina marry John Bowman
++ Joseph marry Charlotte Rothmahler
William marry Mary Brewton Motte
++ William marry Mary Young
Charlotte marry John Lyde Wilson
Rebecca marry Robert Young Hayne
Motte, Jacob and Elizabeth Martin
++ Sarah marry Thomas Shubrick
Elizabeth Shubrick marry Thomas Lynch Jr
++ Hannah marry Thomas Lynch
Elizabeth Lynch marry James Hamilton
James Hamilton marry Elizabeth Heyward
++ Jacob marry Rebecca Brewton
++ Mary marry William Drayton
William Drayton marry Maria Miles Heyward
Drayton, Thomas
++ Thomas - Elizabeth Bull
William - Mary Motte
William - Maria Miles Heyward (above)
++ John Drayton - Charlotte Bull
William Henry
John, the governor
Allston, Robert. A Memoir of the Introduction and Planting of Rice in South Carolina, 1843, reprinted in several other publications, including James Dunwoody, The Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States, volume 2, 1852.
Coclanis, Peter A. The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920, 1989, rice production statistics.
Dusinberre William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, 2000.
Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go out Free: the Lives of Denmark Vesey, 1999, list slaves arrested during the investigation and their owners.
Larry Koger. "Black Masters: The Misunderstood Slaveowners," Southern Quarterly 43:52–73:2006, on Plowden Weston.
The constant possibility of failure in the face of uncontrollable conditions makes people superstitious. When repetition doesn’t lead to success, the answer is often symbolic repetition. Agricultural peoples are among the most susceptible when their crops are subject to the vagaries of weather and plagues. When religion and reason preclude superstitious rituals, other more secular outlets are found to assert control over fate.
Growing rice was always risky. When the crop failed there was no income but prices were high for those who managed to harvest something. When the crop flourished, prices fell from surpluses and no one made much profit. The good years, when both the crop and price were good, were rare.
People who first succeed because they could think innovatively are sometimes able to adapt to changes more quickly than those who struggled to succeed or who always copy others and face failure by repetition with minor variations hoping to correct what they had done wrong.
None knew better than Nathaniel Heyward the need to keep changing. He had always preferred newly imported slaves. When Congress banned the importation of new slaves beginning the first of January, 1808, he and others had to confront the changed supply and cost of labor.
Peter Colclanis shows that rice planters did, indeed, adapt by improving per capita yields. The number of slaves in the low country dropped .5% between 1820 and 1830, but the production per individual increased from 241.85 pounds in 1820 to 377.53 in 1830.
When new slaves with usable skills were no longer available, planters turned to technology. Robert Allston found patents for hulling rice appeared sporadically from 1809 and increased in the 1820's, while new applications for threshers began in 1828 and culminated in a workable machine in 1830.
Unfortunately, Colclanis also shows that prices fell after the end of the Napoleonic wars in Europe. Exports from Charleston in 1818 had been worth 11 million dollars but fell to 8 million in 1819, and stayed between 7 and 8 million for most of the decade. They only rose to 11 million again in 1825, then hit that value again in the 1830's before falling to the 7-8 million range in the 1840's.
South Carolina responded to the labor and market crises by forbidding the manumission of slaves in 1820. Although the enforcement of the law varied, the population of freedmen in the low country dropped .9% in the 1820's. While there’s no clear evidence the General Assembly granted freedom to Philip Noisette’s wife and children when he died in 1835, they seem to have been left alone.
Similarly, when Plowden Weston, a merchant who had immigrated in 1757, died in 1827 he requested two of his slaves, Lydia and Anthony, be treated as freemen. The later was a millwright, who had improved the yield of a threshing machine by 1,000 bushels a day. Although his freedom wasn’t acknowledged by the state, Weston’s executors followed his wishes and let Anthony control his time.
Even so, the suspicion of freedmen grew after 1820 and culminated in the trial of Denmark Vesey in 1822. James Hamilton was intendant of Charleston when John Prioleau and John Lyde Wilson reported rumors of a slave insurrection. Hamilton appointed two judges and five jurors, including Nathaniel Heyward and William Drayton, to investigate.
After 34 men had been hung, the governor, who owned three of the executed, argued the deliberations violated the law. The attorney general, Robert Young Hayne, disagreed. Wilson, Hayne, Drayton and Hamilton all exploited their enhanced reputations for political gain, culminating in the nullification crisis of 1832.
In a small society like the Carolina low country, it was inevitable the planters would become more related with each generation. What’s interesting is that, unlike the ones who ordered mills from Jonathan Lucas who had led lives that showed they could adapt to changing circumstances, the ones who supported Hamilton were the children of the siblings who had not pioneered introducing technology into the rice fields.
Of the grandchildren of William Allston and Esther LaBruce, one, William Alston ordered a mill from Lucas, and two married men who worked with Lucas, John Bowman and Andrew Johnston. The daughters of their other son married Wilson and Hayne and did not order mills.
Among the Mottes, only Jacob’s wife, Rebecca Brewton raised daughters who were willing to invest in untried technology. Jacob’s sisters married more conventionally: Sarah was the
grandmother of Hamilton’s uncle, Thomas Lynch; Hannah was Hamilton’s grandmother, and Sarah was the mother of Hamilton’s law partner, William Drayton. Sarah’s daughter, Hannah, married Heyward’s brother William, and their daughter married the younger Drayton; they may be the ones who ridiculed Heyward when he was a young man visiting Charleston.
When faced with the problem of a more expensive labor supply, some, like Weston, responded creatively by finding ways to use their workers more effectively, and others, like Hamilton, attacked those who criticized slavery in any way. Still others, like Nathaniel Heyward, tried both.
The governor, Thomas Bennett, was not the only political opponent to have his slaves investigated. One of the banished men, Charles Drayton, was the property of William’s second cousin, John Drayton. The former governor was the son of William Henry Drayton who had rebelled against his William Bull grandfather during the revolution, while William’s father had followed the Bulls to England after the fall of Charleston.
Two slaves belonging to Jonathan Lucas’ son, Bram Lucas and Richard Lucas, were held before they were acquitted. The younger Jonathan Lucas left the country later that year, and began building mills for England, thereby hastening the loss of Carolina rice’s hegemony in world markets, a loss already foreshadowed by the lower prices.
Notes: See postings on James Hamilton and Denmark Vesey from 10 January 2010 through 7 March 2010.
Allston, William and Esther La Bruce
++ Esther marry Archibald Johnston
Andrew Johnston marry Sarah Eliot McKewn
++ Elizabeth marry Thomas Lynch
Sabina marry John Bowman
++ Joseph marry Charlotte Rothmahler
William marry Mary Brewton Motte
++ William marry Mary Young
Charlotte marry John Lyde Wilson
Rebecca marry Robert Young Hayne
Motte, Jacob and Elizabeth Martin
++ Sarah marry Thomas Shubrick
Elizabeth Shubrick marry Thomas Lynch Jr
++ Hannah marry Thomas Lynch
Elizabeth Lynch marry James Hamilton
James Hamilton marry Elizabeth Heyward
++ Jacob marry Rebecca Brewton
++ Mary marry William Drayton
William Drayton marry Maria Miles Heyward
Drayton, Thomas
++ Thomas - Elizabeth Bull
William - Mary Motte
William - Maria Miles Heyward (above)
++ John Drayton - Charlotte Bull
William Henry
John, the governor
Allston, Robert. A Memoir of the Introduction and Planting of Rice in South Carolina, 1843, reprinted in several other publications, including James Dunwoody, The Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States, volume 2, 1852.
Coclanis, Peter A. The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920, 1989, rice production statistics.
Dusinberre William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, 2000.
Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go out Free: the Lives of Denmark Vesey, 1999, list slaves arrested during the investigation and their owners.
Larry Koger. "Black Masters: The Misunderstood Slaveowners," Southern Quarterly 43:52–73:2006, on Plowden Weston.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
South Carolina - Spirt of Innovation
Once an innovation is accepted, an aura of inevitability develops around it, so one can’t imagine things having been any other way.
However, the atmosphere of innovation among South Carolina rice planters could not have been predicted: it was the fragile result of immigrants bringing in new ideas from Philadelphia and Edinburgh, and from people’s individual experiences during the war. There was nothing to say it would be perpetuated.
Ulrich B. Phillips describes Nathaniel Heyward as a man who was "was venturesome in large things, conservative in small." He had built a pounding mill, but was slow to convert it to steam. He was slower to use mechanical threshers because he wanted to keep his slaves busy in winter. And, it was his strong preference that those slaves be freshly imported from Africa.
Similarly, John Bowman was willing to gamble on an unknown millwright in 1787, but the next year actively campaigned against ratification of the constitution, even though his wife’s brother, Thomas Lynch, had signed the Declaration of Independence.
The mixture of conservative and progressive impulses, found in most of us, was perhaps more extreme in Charleston where the social ideal of the elite was still defined by the landed gentry in southwestern England who had supported the royalists in their civil war and not by the merchant entrepreneurs of London who backed parliament.
Indeed, Phillips, a post-Reconstruction southern historian believes investments in land and slaves were the "large things" and interest in labor-saving, productivity enhancing technology the "small." He believes Heyward remained active in running his many plantations, and that the "assistance rendered by his sons kept the scattered establishments in an efficient routine."
William Dusinberre has quite a different view of Heyward, that humiliated by his first entry into Charleston society, he spoiled his sons and that only one, Charles, had any interest in business.
He notes that Nathaniel’s father had been an innovator when he moved to Beaufort, but that he gave his older sons a classical education. The eldest Thomas, son of his first wife Mary Miles, signed the Declaration of Independence and was sent to Saint Augustine by the British in 1780.
The older son of Heyward’s second marriage to Jane Elizabeth Gignilliat, James, had the same European education but married an actress, Susan Cole, and died soon after. She remarried, and Nathaniel spent years discrediting her and salvaging the rice lands he’d developed.
Thomas’s son Daniel was more like his uncle James. He married a French speaking tailor, Ann Sarah Trezevant, and soon died. When she remarried, Nathaniel took over the rice lands and fought her rights in court, a battle that continued when her daughter Elizabeth married James Hamilton.
A similar pattern is found in the family of Bowman’s in-laws. His wife’s father, Thomas Lynch, was the son of Thomas Lynch, who pioneered rice on the Santee, and was raised to be a gentleman. Like Heyward, Lynch read law in England, toured the continent, and later became involved in colonial politics.
His sister Elizabeth married James Hamilton and spent more time in Newport, where she raised her son James, than Charleston. By the time the younger James married Heyward’s niece’s daughter, Elizabeth, neither had spent much time on a rice plantation and saw their patrimony as an asset to be sold not managed.
The inland rice pioneers like Daniel Heyward and Thomas Lynch raised oldest sons who were drawn into the great political fight with Great Britain, but had no interest in the source of their wealth. Daniel’s younger son, Nathaniel, pioneered tidal cultivation, but he too didn’t perpetuate his interest in his children, and saw the results of innovation and hard work frittered away by actresses and tailors.
The planters who were the first to adopt the innovations of others were a bit more successful. Walter Edgar says that in 1850, a dozen men each harvested more than 100,000 pounds of rice in Georgetown County, and they included the grandson of Plowden Weston, the grandson of Mary Izard Middleton and the stepson of Rebecca Brewton Motte’s daughter Mary.
However, the wealthy planters were better known for the way they lived their lives rather than the way they financed them. Plowden Charles Jennet Weston was a judge described as a "gentleman of most excellent education and rare ability" who published a history of the state. John Izard Middleton was Secretary of the American legation to Russia in the 1820's, before become active in the nullification crises of 1832. William Algernon Alston married his cousin Mary, the sister of the painter Washington Allston. Like any large planter, he served in the South Carolina house and owned more than one house in Charleston.
Still, according to George Rogers, those descendants who were still growing rice in Georgetown County in the 1850's, never fully relied on their overseers and never completely left the area during the growing season. They were more likely to escape malaria at inland resorts like that near Hezekiah Maham’s Pineville than go north as the Hamiltons had done. The time they spent in Charleston was the winter.
The spirit of innovation lasted two generations at most, those leading the revolution and their parents. It was difficult, though not impossible, for a family to maintain the spirit of specialized knowledge and a work ethic into the third generation in a culture of luxury.
Notes: The other signers of the Declaration of Independence were Arthur Middleton, husband of Mary Izard, and Edward Rutledge, a land speculator.
Behan, William A. A Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina, 2004, on Elizabeth Matthews Heyward.
Dusinberre William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, 2000.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina, 1998; he doesn’t name all 12 men; his source was George Rogers
Miller Kerby A. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815, 2003, on Bowman.
Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime, 1918.
Rogers, George. The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina, 1970, reprinted by Georgetown County Historical Society.
Smith, Henry A. M. "The Baronies of South Carolina," The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, April 1913; unattributed description of Weston.
However, the atmosphere of innovation among South Carolina rice planters could not have been predicted: it was the fragile result of immigrants bringing in new ideas from Philadelphia and Edinburgh, and from people’s individual experiences during the war. There was nothing to say it would be perpetuated.
Ulrich B. Phillips describes Nathaniel Heyward as a man who was "was venturesome in large things, conservative in small." He had built a pounding mill, but was slow to convert it to steam. He was slower to use mechanical threshers because he wanted to keep his slaves busy in winter. And, it was his strong preference that those slaves be freshly imported from Africa.
Similarly, John Bowman was willing to gamble on an unknown millwright in 1787, but the next year actively campaigned against ratification of the constitution, even though his wife’s brother, Thomas Lynch, had signed the Declaration of Independence.
The mixture of conservative and progressive impulses, found in most of us, was perhaps more extreme in Charleston where the social ideal of the elite was still defined by the landed gentry in southwestern England who had supported the royalists in their civil war and not by the merchant entrepreneurs of London who backed parliament.
Indeed, Phillips, a post-Reconstruction southern historian believes investments in land and slaves were the "large things" and interest in labor-saving, productivity enhancing technology the "small." He believes Heyward remained active in running his many plantations, and that the "assistance rendered by his sons kept the scattered establishments in an efficient routine."
William Dusinberre has quite a different view of Heyward, that humiliated by his first entry into Charleston society, he spoiled his sons and that only one, Charles, had any interest in business.
He notes that Nathaniel’s father had been an innovator when he moved to Beaufort, but that he gave his older sons a classical education. The eldest Thomas, son of his first wife Mary Miles, signed the Declaration of Independence and was sent to Saint Augustine by the British in 1780.
The older son of Heyward’s second marriage to Jane Elizabeth Gignilliat, James, had the same European education but married an actress, Susan Cole, and died soon after. She remarried, and Nathaniel spent years discrediting her and salvaging the rice lands he’d developed.
Thomas’s son Daniel was more like his uncle James. He married a French speaking tailor, Ann Sarah Trezevant, and soon died. When she remarried, Nathaniel took over the rice lands and fought her rights in court, a battle that continued when her daughter Elizabeth married James Hamilton.
A similar pattern is found in the family of Bowman’s in-laws. His wife’s father, Thomas Lynch, was the son of Thomas Lynch, who pioneered rice on the Santee, and was raised to be a gentleman. Like Heyward, Lynch read law in England, toured the continent, and later became involved in colonial politics.
His sister Elizabeth married James Hamilton and spent more time in Newport, where she raised her son James, than Charleston. By the time the younger James married Heyward’s niece’s daughter, Elizabeth, neither had spent much time on a rice plantation and saw their patrimony as an asset to be sold not managed.
The inland rice pioneers like Daniel Heyward and Thomas Lynch raised oldest sons who were drawn into the great political fight with Great Britain, but had no interest in the source of their wealth. Daniel’s younger son, Nathaniel, pioneered tidal cultivation, but he too didn’t perpetuate his interest in his children, and saw the results of innovation and hard work frittered away by actresses and tailors.
The planters who were the first to adopt the innovations of others were a bit more successful. Walter Edgar says that in 1850, a dozen men each harvested more than 100,000 pounds of rice in Georgetown County, and they included the grandson of Plowden Weston, the grandson of Mary Izard Middleton and the stepson of Rebecca Brewton Motte’s daughter Mary.
However, the wealthy planters were better known for the way they lived their lives rather than the way they financed them. Plowden Charles Jennet Weston was a judge described as a "gentleman of most excellent education and rare ability" who published a history of the state. John Izard Middleton was Secretary of the American legation to Russia in the 1820's, before become active in the nullification crises of 1832. William Algernon Alston married his cousin Mary, the sister of the painter Washington Allston. Like any large planter, he served in the South Carolina house and owned more than one house in Charleston.
Still, according to George Rogers, those descendants who were still growing rice in Georgetown County in the 1850's, never fully relied on their overseers and never completely left the area during the growing season. They were more likely to escape malaria at inland resorts like that near Hezekiah Maham’s Pineville than go north as the Hamiltons had done. The time they spent in Charleston was the winter.
The spirit of innovation lasted two generations at most, those leading the revolution and their parents. It was difficult, though not impossible, for a family to maintain the spirit of specialized knowledge and a work ethic into the third generation in a culture of luxury.
Notes: The other signers of the Declaration of Independence were Arthur Middleton, husband of Mary Izard, and Edward Rutledge, a land speculator.
Behan, William A. A Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina, 2004, on Elizabeth Matthews Heyward.
Dusinberre William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, 2000.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina, 1998; he doesn’t name all 12 men; his source was George Rogers
Miller Kerby A. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815, 2003, on Bowman.
Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime, 1918.
Rogers, George. The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina, 1970, reprinted by Georgetown County Historical Society.
Smith, Henry A. M. "The Baronies of South Carolina," The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, April 1913; unattributed description of Weston.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
South Carolina - Mill Acceptance
Joyce Chaplin argues Jonathan Lucas gets too much credit as the inventor of the pounding mill, that other men had preceded him as other men had preceded Nathaniel Heyward in using tidal cultivation and others had introduced rice besides Henry Woodward.
She’s correct that whenever there are important inventions or scientific discoveries, there usually are many who recognize the problem and are working towards a solution. Robert Allston mentions Robert Nesbit who returned from a trip to Scotland to introduce a wind-operated threshing mill 1811 and a drill plow to simplify planting in 1812.
However, an idea must be accepted before it’s a successful innovation. Heyward was important because others followed his specific example. Nesbit was not because his neighbors abandoned his tools after he died in 1821, because they required workers have more skills than they could expect.
James Jonathan Lucas listed the people who ordered mills from his grandfather, so we know the path of diffusion for his innovation. No doubt he only mentions the most noted customers, but then those are the ones most likely to have influenced others.
Between John Bowman and Andrew Johnston he names Mrs. Thomas Middleton, Peter Horry, William Alston, Plowden Weston and Mrs. Arthur Middleton. The most important lines of communication weren’t between the Middleton brothers, but between the daughters of Rebecca Brewton and the grandchildren of William Allston.
Rebecca’s grandfather, Miles Brewton, had followed Jonathan Bryan into Georgia. She married Jacob Motte and became famous during the revolution when she helped Francis Marion burn her Congaree plantation house that the British had taken as a headquarters.
Rebecca was wealthy apart from her marriage: she inherited her brother Miles’ property when he died at sea. Laura Edwards suggests she defied convention when she settled plantations, no doubt those from Miles, on her daughters alone, and did not give her sons-in-law ownership. Her daughter Frances married Thomas Middleton, while Mary married William Alston.
Among the Middletons, both Frances Motte and Mary Izard were widows refusing to remarry at the time they ordered mills for the estates they managed. Like Frances’ mother, Mary Izard inherited property from her brother John, which is the land she developed on the Combahee with Lucas. Also like Rebecca Motte, she was left to her own devices during the war when her husband Arthur was a prisoner at Saint Augustine, and in this time, apparently, was reduced to begging from friends to feed her children.
The linkages and lines of influence may have been stronger between Rebecca and Mary, because Mary’s cousin, also Mary Izard, was the daughter of her father Walter’s brother Joseph who married Rebecca’s brother Miles.
William Allston and Esther LaBruce’s daughter Elizabeth married Thomas Lynch. Their daughter married John Bowman. Elizabeth’s sister Esther married Archibald Johnston, whose son was Andrew, while her brother Joseph’s son William married Mary Brewton Motte.
The path of diffusion then went from Elizabeth Allston Lynch’s daughter Sabina Bowman to her cousin by marriage, Frances Motte Middleton, and her cousin William Alston, married to Frances’ sister Mary. From there patronage passed to Frances’ cousin-in-law, Mary Izard Middleton.
The others, Peter Horry and Plowden Weston had plantations in the same area. Indeed, Weston’s Laurel Hill bordered land inherited by William and Esther Allston’s son John. John’s son William married Rachel Moore; when he died, she and her new husband sold the land she controlled. Her son, Washington Allston, sold Springfield to his cousin Benjamin Allston, while she sold Brook Green to Robert and Francis Withers who sold it to Joshua Ward, the husband of Benjamin Allston’s wife’s sister.
To keep himself identifiable in a family that reused names in each generation, the William who ordered the mill from Lucas changed his last name to Alston, while his uncles continued to use two L’s.
It’s rare to be able to trace diffusion so clearly. However, the Lucases’ mills might not have spread if the person who ordered one after Andrew Johnston hadn’t been Henry Laurens. The Allstons and Mottes proved the invention worked; Laurens gave it credibility with a larger market.
Notes: Mills built by Jonathon Lucas. List from James Jonathan Lucas, letter dated 20 April 1904 reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.
1787 John Bowman, Peach Island, married to Sabina Lynch, granddaughter of William Allston
Wife Sabina Lynch
Her mother Elizabeth Allston
Her grandparents William Allston and Esther LaBruce
* Frances Motte Middleton, Washo plantation
Daughter of Rebecca Brewton and Jacob Motte
* Peter Horry, Winyah Bay
Wife’s sister married to Daniel Heyward
Horry uncle of Nathaniel Heyward
* William Alston, Fairfield on Waccamaw
Son of Joseph Allston
Grandson of William Allston and Esther LaBruce
Married to Mary Brewton Motte
Her parents Rebecca Brewton and Jacob Motte
* Plowden Weston, Laurel Hill on Waccamaw
Neighbor of William Allston’s widow Rachel Moore
His father John Allston
His grandparents William Allston and Esther LaBruce
* Mary Izard Middleton, Hobonny on Combahee
Daughter of Walter Izard
Niece of Joseph Izard, father of Mary Izard who married Miles Brewton
Cousin-in-law of Rebecca Brewton through her brother Miles
1791-1792 Andrew Johnston, Millbrook
Son of Esther Allston and Archibald Johnston
Grandson of William Allston and Esther LaBruce
1793 Henry Laurens, Mepkin
Many think it was Washington Allston’s older stepbrother Benjamin who was the one who bought Springfield, not the cousin Benjamin. The brother Benjamin was supposed to have inherited Brook Green. The resolution of William Allston’s estate was apparently messy, and no one provides any strong evidence to support the claim for either Benjamin.
Allston, Robert. A Memoir of the Introduction and Planting of Rice in South Carolina, 1843, reprinted in several other publications, including James Dunwoody, The Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States, volume 2, 1852, on Nesbit.
Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993.
Edwards Laura F. The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South, 2009.
Lane, G. Winston Jr. “Economic Power among Eighteenth-Century Women of the Carolina Lowcountry: Four Generations of Middleton Women, 1678-1800,” in Jack P. Greene, Randy J. Sparks, and Rosemary Brana-Shute, Money, Trade and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina's Plantation Society, 2000, on Frances Motte and Mary Izard.
She’s correct that whenever there are important inventions or scientific discoveries, there usually are many who recognize the problem and are working towards a solution. Robert Allston mentions Robert Nesbit who returned from a trip to Scotland to introduce a wind-operated threshing mill 1811 and a drill plow to simplify planting in 1812.
However, an idea must be accepted before it’s a successful innovation. Heyward was important because others followed his specific example. Nesbit was not because his neighbors abandoned his tools after he died in 1821, because they required workers have more skills than they could expect.
James Jonathan Lucas listed the people who ordered mills from his grandfather, so we know the path of diffusion for his innovation. No doubt he only mentions the most noted customers, but then those are the ones most likely to have influenced others.
Between John Bowman and Andrew Johnston he names Mrs. Thomas Middleton, Peter Horry, William Alston, Plowden Weston and Mrs. Arthur Middleton. The most important lines of communication weren’t between the Middleton brothers, but between the daughters of Rebecca Brewton and the grandchildren of William Allston.
Rebecca’s grandfather, Miles Brewton, had followed Jonathan Bryan into Georgia. She married Jacob Motte and became famous during the revolution when she helped Francis Marion burn her Congaree plantation house that the British had taken as a headquarters.
Rebecca was wealthy apart from her marriage: she inherited her brother Miles’ property when he died at sea. Laura Edwards suggests she defied convention when she settled plantations, no doubt those from Miles, on her daughters alone, and did not give her sons-in-law ownership. Her daughter Frances married Thomas Middleton, while Mary married William Alston.
Among the Middletons, both Frances Motte and Mary Izard were widows refusing to remarry at the time they ordered mills for the estates they managed. Like Frances’ mother, Mary Izard inherited property from her brother John, which is the land she developed on the Combahee with Lucas. Also like Rebecca Motte, she was left to her own devices during the war when her husband Arthur was a prisoner at Saint Augustine, and in this time, apparently, was reduced to begging from friends to feed her children.
The linkages and lines of influence may have been stronger between Rebecca and Mary, because Mary’s cousin, also Mary Izard, was the daughter of her father Walter’s brother Joseph who married Rebecca’s brother Miles.
William Allston and Esther LaBruce’s daughter Elizabeth married Thomas Lynch. Their daughter married John Bowman. Elizabeth’s sister Esther married Archibald Johnston, whose son was Andrew, while her brother Joseph’s son William married Mary Brewton Motte.
The path of diffusion then went from Elizabeth Allston Lynch’s daughter Sabina Bowman to her cousin by marriage, Frances Motte Middleton, and her cousin William Alston, married to Frances’ sister Mary. From there patronage passed to Frances’ cousin-in-law, Mary Izard Middleton.
The others, Peter Horry and Plowden Weston had plantations in the same area. Indeed, Weston’s Laurel Hill bordered land inherited by William and Esther Allston’s son John. John’s son William married Rachel Moore; when he died, she and her new husband sold the land she controlled. Her son, Washington Allston, sold Springfield to his cousin Benjamin Allston, while she sold Brook Green to Robert and Francis Withers who sold it to Joshua Ward, the husband of Benjamin Allston’s wife’s sister.
To keep himself identifiable in a family that reused names in each generation, the William who ordered the mill from Lucas changed his last name to Alston, while his uncles continued to use two L’s.
It’s rare to be able to trace diffusion so clearly. However, the Lucases’ mills might not have spread if the person who ordered one after Andrew Johnston hadn’t been Henry Laurens. The Allstons and Mottes proved the invention worked; Laurens gave it credibility with a larger market.
Notes: Mills built by Jonathon Lucas. List from James Jonathan Lucas, letter dated 20 April 1904 reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.
1787 John Bowman, Peach Island, married to Sabina Lynch, granddaughter of William Allston
Wife Sabina Lynch
Her mother Elizabeth Allston
Her grandparents William Allston and Esther LaBruce
* Frances Motte Middleton, Washo plantation
Daughter of Rebecca Brewton and Jacob Motte
* Peter Horry, Winyah Bay
Wife’s sister married to Daniel Heyward
Horry uncle of Nathaniel Heyward
* William Alston, Fairfield on Waccamaw
Son of Joseph Allston
Grandson of William Allston and Esther LaBruce
Married to Mary Brewton Motte
Her parents Rebecca Brewton and Jacob Motte
* Plowden Weston, Laurel Hill on Waccamaw
Neighbor of William Allston’s widow Rachel Moore
His father John Allston
His grandparents William Allston and Esther LaBruce
* Mary Izard Middleton, Hobonny on Combahee
Daughter of Walter Izard
Niece of Joseph Izard, father of Mary Izard who married Miles Brewton
Cousin-in-law of Rebecca Brewton through her brother Miles
1791-1792 Andrew Johnston, Millbrook
Son of Esther Allston and Archibald Johnston
Grandson of William Allston and Esther LaBruce
1793 Henry Laurens, Mepkin
Many think it was Washington Allston’s older stepbrother Benjamin who was the one who bought Springfield, not the cousin Benjamin. The brother Benjamin was supposed to have inherited Brook Green. The resolution of William Allston’s estate was apparently messy, and no one provides any strong evidence to support the claim for either Benjamin.
Allston, Robert. A Memoir of the Introduction and Planting of Rice in South Carolina, 1843, reprinted in several other publications, including James Dunwoody, The Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States, volume 2, 1852, on Nesbit.
Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993.
Edwards Laura F. The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South, 2009.
Lane, G. Winston Jr. “Economic Power among Eighteenth-Century Women of the Carolina Lowcountry: Four Generations of Middleton Women, 1678-1800,” in Jack P. Greene, Randy J. Sparks, and Rosemary Brana-Shute, Money, Trade and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina's Plantation Society, 2000, on Frances Motte and Mary Izard.
Sunday, September 05, 2010
South Carolina - Mill Invention
The widespread adaption of tidal rice cultivation precipitated a crisis in the old order: more rice was produced than slaves, using African derived mortar and pestles, could process. No one was willing to buy surplus slaves to handle the harvest work load, and some, who increased the work hours, realized their slaves were getting injured from the resulting fatigue and they were losing more than a quarter of their premium crop to poor handling.
They fell into what I call the contractor’s conundrum: the more successful a builder, the greater the costs and the fewer the rewards. Henry Ford’s answer had been improved automation, a solution criticized by many but rooted in the history of our industrial revolution.
However, when improved rice yields were overwhelming traditional processes, the idea of improved tooling was new. Oliver Evans patented the gravity-fed flouring mill that simplified grinding wheat in 1790. Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, which made the mass production of cotton in South Carolina possible, in 1794.
Jonathan Lucas built the first workable rice mill for John Bowman in 1787.
His story, as told by his grandson, includes elements of both chance and cultural deliberation. His parents were mill owners in Cumberland County on England’s northwestern boundary with Scotland who trained their son to be a millwright.
During the final year of the revolution, while the Peace of Paris was being negotiated, Lucas, then in his late 20's, emigrated to the New World. The proverbial story holds he was headed for the Caribbean when a storm damaged his ship and landed him in Charleston in 1783.
Two years later, in 1785, a Scots immigrant hired him to build a saw mill on Hog Island. While he was working on the Santee, he and Bowman apparently discussed the problems of preparing rice for market. Two years later, Lucas built an experimental rice mill at Bowman’s Peach Island plantation that imitated the pounding action of the mortar.
By 1793, Plowden Weston was complaining his horse driven mill was so slow he could only process two or three batches a day. By then, Lucas had built a mill powered by the tides at Millbrook for Andrew Johnston, the son of a Scots immigrant, Archibald Johnston.
Jonathan’s son Jonathan married Sarah Lydia Simons in 1799 and soon after built a commercial mill on her Middleburg plantation where local planters could bring their grain to be processed. They also built mills in Charleston, and, in 1817, erected a steam mill in the harbor.
When the senior Lucas died in Charleston in 1822, he had transformed the tidal rice industry. By 1843, Robert Allston observed, "almost every planter of four hundred acres and upward, is provided with a tide-water or steam-pounding mill."
Notes:
Allston, Robert. A Memoir of the Introduction and Planting of Rice in South Carolina, 1843, reprinted in several other publications, including James Dunwoody, The Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States, volume 2, 1852.
Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001, describe crisis, broken rice sold at a lower price.
Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993, quotes Weston.
Lucas, James Jonathan. Letter dated 20 April 1904 reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.
They fell into what I call the contractor’s conundrum: the more successful a builder, the greater the costs and the fewer the rewards. Henry Ford’s answer had been improved automation, a solution criticized by many but rooted in the history of our industrial revolution.
However, when improved rice yields were overwhelming traditional processes, the idea of improved tooling was new. Oliver Evans patented the gravity-fed flouring mill that simplified grinding wheat in 1790. Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, which made the mass production of cotton in South Carolina possible, in 1794.
Jonathan Lucas built the first workable rice mill for John Bowman in 1787.
His story, as told by his grandson, includes elements of both chance and cultural deliberation. His parents were mill owners in Cumberland County on England’s northwestern boundary with Scotland who trained their son to be a millwright.
During the final year of the revolution, while the Peace of Paris was being negotiated, Lucas, then in his late 20's, emigrated to the New World. The proverbial story holds he was headed for the Caribbean when a storm damaged his ship and landed him in Charleston in 1783.
Two years later, in 1785, a Scots immigrant hired him to build a saw mill on Hog Island. While he was working on the Santee, he and Bowman apparently discussed the problems of preparing rice for market. Two years later, Lucas built an experimental rice mill at Bowman’s Peach Island plantation that imitated the pounding action of the mortar.
By 1793, Plowden Weston was complaining his horse driven mill was so slow he could only process two or three batches a day. By then, Lucas had built a mill powered by the tides at Millbrook for Andrew Johnston, the son of a Scots immigrant, Archibald Johnston.
Jonathan’s son Jonathan married Sarah Lydia Simons in 1799 and soon after built a commercial mill on her Middleburg plantation where local planters could bring their grain to be processed. They also built mills in Charleston, and, in 1817, erected a steam mill in the harbor.
When the senior Lucas died in Charleston in 1822, he had transformed the tidal rice industry. By 1843, Robert Allston observed, "almost every planter of four hundred acres and upward, is provided with a tide-water or steam-pounding mill."
Notes:
Allston, Robert. A Memoir of the Introduction and Planting of Rice in South Carolina, 1843, reprinted in several other publications, including James Dunwoody, The Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States, volume 2, 1852.
Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001, describe crisis, broken rice sold at a lower price.
Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993, quotes Weston.
Lucas, James Jonathan. Letter dated 20 April 1904 reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
South Carolina - Land
Rice has specific demands that limit the land that can be used to cultivate it.
In the early years in South Carolina, rice was grown near the coast where rain irrigated the crop. In the 1720's, planters moved up the rivers into the inland swamps where they impounded water in ponds or reserves. However, they were only able to store enough to flood their fields when it was germinating; the rest of the season they depended on nature.
The land around Charleston had been developed first. Huguenots then settled north around what became Georgetown at the mouth of the Santee, Pee Dee, Waccamaw and Black rivers. Their descendants moved upstream.
Daniel Heyward introduced rice to the south at Beaufort in 1741, and planters moved up the Combahee. Farther movement across the Savannah was limited by the proprietors of Georgia who didn’t permit slavery. After much political maneuvering in London, slavery was allowed in 1751 and George II reorganized the colony in 1752. Jonathan Bryan was the first to move south with 66 slaves, followed by Miles Brewton and William Williamson.
By the time Hezekiah Maham acquired his rice land up the Santee near Pineville in 1771 people were developing marginal land plagued by floods they called freshets and younger sons like Nathaniel Heyward were inheriting poorer plantations. Heyward’s first crop on the Combahee was destroyed by too much water that flooded his fields.
He believed he was too far inland to adequately drain away the excess in 1787. Men had been considering planting the lands bordering the saline estuaries since the 1750's: Archibald Johstone used the tides at Estherville plantation on Winyah Bay in 1758. However, few could regulate the flow to allow the fresh and bar the salt water.
In 1788, when Heyward was 22, he experimented on his brother James’ tidal land and was so successful others followed his example. William Dusinberre says his primary contribution was determining when and how to let water flood the land. Others figured out how to build the embankments and canals, borrowing from the Dutch. Still others improved the sluice gates, sometimes adapting African techniques, and introduced European pumps.
The adoption of tidal irrigation took rice farming from the realm of the amateur planter and his African slaves to professionals able to invest large sums in building irrigation systems. The rewards were greater yields and less labor spent weeding because standing water suppressed their growth. The unexpected cost was the need to constantly maintain dykes and canals.
Scientific knowledge became important. Heyward told his future son-in-law, Charles Maginault, to spend the year before he married, 1824, abroad and to pay special attention to the reclamation efforts on the Humber river. Similarly, Robert Allston, the friend and distant cousin of John Joshua Ward, had gone to West Point in 1821, then applied his knowledge of port engineering to manage his rice lands.
Money or access to credit remained important because the new irrigation systems needed manual labor to build. After the revolutionary war, there was a dearth of both. The slave trade suffered during the war, but demand in the Caribbean remained. As part of their efforts to defeat the colony and finance the war, the British shipped slaves south and encouraged others to abandon plantations. Philip Morgan estimates a quarter were gone from the land when peace arrived.
Merchants were still pressing for payment of war-time debts under the Articles of Confederation, and pre-war slave traders like William Wragg were dead or in exile. The same year the constitution was ratified in 1787, the General Assembly passed laws that temporarily limited the slave trade.
Fortunately, Heyward had access to everything he needed, even though his education may have been left to chance. After his father died in 1777 when he was 11, he was left with his step-mother who had younger children. He apparently was raised in a frontier society on the Combahee that opened him to ridicule when he stayed with one of his older brothers in sophisticated Charleston. However, someone did send him to spend 18 months in Europe after the war.
He made the appropriate social contacts and, in February of 1788, married Henrietta Manigault, daughter of the richest man in Charleston. Peter Manigault had read law at the Inner Temple, then married the daughter of merchant Joseph Wragg. He preferred managing the assets of others to the courtroom. In 1763 he took over the management of his father-in-law, Ralph Izard’s rice and indigo plantations on Goose Creek.
After tidal irrigation was established, the prime land for rice shrank to a strip about 30 miles wide from Georgetown south into Florida. The inland swamps slowly reverted to nature. No one bothered to rebuild when Hezekiah Maham’s house burned. People who wanted to become rich turned to cotton.
From the 1820's until the civil war, ownership of tidal lands became concentrated in the hands of people who could make it work - a rationalization similar to that which occurs when any new industry matures. By 1850, 91 planters in northern Georgetown County each produced more than 100,000 pounds, 98% of the rice grown in the area.
When he died in 1851, Nathaniel Heyward was the largest slaveholder in the south with 2,340 slaves and 17 plantations. When Joshua John Ward died in 1860, he was the largest slave owner. He had 1,130 chattel on nine plantations.
They expanded by buying existing plantations from others while adventurers like Heyward’s grandson-in-law, James Hamilton, were pushed west to open cotton land in Alabama, then Texas.
Each of the changes in farmland, from the early coastal cultivation to the inland swamps to the tide flooded land, not only changed who could succeed but brought changes in the variety of rice that prospered. However, slaves from the rice growing areas of Africa were still valued.
Notes:
Dusinberre, William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, 2000.
Rogers, George C. Junior. The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina, 1970.
Manigault, Edward Lining, Jr. The Manigault Family of South Carolina, Its Ancestors and Descendants.
Morgan, Philip D. "Black Society in the Lowcountry, 1760-1810," in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, 1983 (cited by Rebecca Brannon and quoted by others without attribution)
Rowland, Lawrence Sanders, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers. The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina: 1514-1861, 1996.
In the early years in South Carolina, rice was grown near the coast where rain irrigated the crop. In the 1720's, planters moved up the rivers into the inland swamps where they impounded water in ponds or reserves. However, they were only able to store enough to flood their fields when it was germinating; the rest of the season they depended on nature.
The land around Charleston had been developed first. Huguenots then settled north around what became Georgetown at the mouth of the Santee, Pee Dee, Waccamaw and Black rivers. Their descendants moved upstream.
Daniel Heyward introduced rice to the south at Beaufort in 1741, and planters moved up the Combahee. Farther movement across the Savannah was limited by the proprietors of Georgia who didn’t permit slavery. After much political maneuvering in London, slavery was allowed in 1751 and George II reorganized the colony in 1752. Jonathan Bryan was the first to move south with 66 slaves, followed by Miles Brewton and William Williamson.
By the time Hezekiah Maham acquired his rice land up the Santee near Pineville in 1771 people were developing marginal land plagued by floods they called freshets and younger sons like Nathaniel Heyward were inheriting poorer plantations. Heyward’s first crop on the Combahee was destroyed by too much water that flooded his fields.
He believed he was too far inland to adequately drain away the excess in 1787. Men had been considering planting the lands bordering the saline estuaries since the 1750's: Archibald Johstone used the tides at Estherville plantation on Winyah Bay in 1758. However, few could regulate the flow to allow the fresh and bar the salt water.
In 1788, when Heyward was 22, he experimented on his brother James’ tidal land and was so successful others followed his example. William Dusinberre says his primary contribution was determining when and how to let water flood the land. Others figured out how to build the embankments and canals, borrowing from the Dutch. Still others improved the sluice gates, sometimes adapting African techniques, and introduced European pumps.
The adoption of tidal irrigation took rice farming from the realm of the amateur planter and his African slaves to professionals able to invest large sums in building irrigation systems. The rewards were greater yields and less labor spent weeding because standing water suppressed their growth. The unexpected cost was the need to constantly maintain dykes and canals.
Scientific knowledge became important. Heyward told his future son-in-law, Charles Maginault, to spend the year before he married, 1824, abroad and to pay special attention to the reclamation efforts on the Humber river. Similarly, Robert Allston, the friend and distant cousin of John Joshua Ward, had gone to West Point in 1821, then applied his knowledge of port engineering to manage his rice lands.
Money or access to credit remained important because the new irrigation systems needed manual labor to build. After the revolutionary war, there was a dearth of both. The slave trade suffered during the war, but demand in the Caribbean remained. As part of their efforts to defeat the colony and finance the war, the British shipped slaves south and encouraged others to abandon plantations. Philip Morgan estimates a quarter were gone from the land when peace arrived.
Merchants were still pressing for payment of war-time debts under the Articles of Confederation, and pre-war slave traders like William Wragg were dead or in exile. The same year the constitution was ratified in 1787, the General Assembly passed laws that temporarily limited the slave trade.
Fortunately, Heyward had access to everything he needed, even though his education may have been left to chance. After his father died in 1777 when he was 11, he was left with his step-mother who had younger children. He apparently was raised in a frontier society on the Combahee that opened him to ridicule when he stayed with one of his older brothers in sophisticated Charleston. However, someone did send him to spend 18 months in Europe after the war.
He made the appropriate social contacts and, in February of 1788, married Henrietta Manigault, daughter of the richest man in Charleston. Peter Manigault had read law at the Inner Temple, then married the daughter of merchant Joseph Wragg. He preferred managing the assets of others to the courtroom. In 1763 he took over the management of his father-in-law, Ralph Izard’s rice and indigo plantations on Goose Creek.
After tidal irrigation was established, the prime land for rice shrank to a strip about 30 miles wide from Georgetown south into Florida. The inland swamps slowly reverted to nature. No one bothered to rebuild when Hezekiah Maham’s house burned. People who wanted to become rich turned to cotton.
From the 1820's until the civil war, ownership of tidal lands became concentrated in the hands of people who could make it work - a rationalization similar to that which occurs when any new industry matures. By 1850, 91 planters in northern Georgetown County each produced more than 100,000 pounds, 98% of the rice grown in the area.
When he died in 1851, Nathaniel Heyward was the largest slaveholder in the south with 2,340 slaves and 17 plantations. When Joshua John Ward died in 1860, he was the largest slave owner. He had 1,130 chattel on nine plantations.
They expanded by buying existing plantations from others while adventurers like Heyward’s grandson-in-law, James Hamilton, were pushed west to open cotton land in Alabama, then Texas.
Each of the changes in farmland, from the early coastal cultivation to the inland swamps to the tide flooded land, not only changed who could succeed but brought changes in the variety of rice that prospered. However, slaves from the rice growing areas of Africa were still valued.
Notes:
Dusinberre, William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, 2000.
Rogers, George C. Junior. The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina, 1970.
Manigault, Edward Lining, Jr. The Manigault Family of South Carolina, Its Ancestors and Descendants.
Morgan, Philip D. "Black Society in the Lowcountry, 1760-1810," in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, 1983 (cited by Rebecca Brannon and quoted by others without attribution)
Rowland, Lawrence Sanders, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers. The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina: 1514-1861, 1996.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
South Carolina - Labor
1738 was the year rice in South Carolina went from a reality to a dream. The price paid in London sterling per hundredweight reached a peak, 9.60, that would not be surpassed until 1772.
A few years before, in 1730, Charles Town exported 41,957 barrels and received 6.29 a hundred weight. A few years later, people believed the number of barrels doubled to 80,000 in 1740. It didn’t matter the price paid was 4.71.
Like the planters in Barbados who ignored their failures to succeed like James Drax, men believed a one-time achievement could become the norm. It had been demonstrated, rice could create a fortune. All that was needed was land, labor, seed rice and the credit to acquire them.
Attempts to produce more rice soon met with failure. Not only did the price fall when quantities increased, but crops failed between 1741 and 1746. Prices hit a low of 2.24 in the 1746.
England had joined Holland to support Austria against France, Saxony, Prussia and Bavaria in their dispute over the right of a woman, Maria Theresa, to assume the Hapsburg throne under Salic law in 1740. The War of Austrian Succession dragged on until 1748, and affected colonies on four continents, the Americas, Africa and southeast Asia.
Not only did shipping costs increase with war, but half the market for rice disappeared. Since 1730, Great Britain had allowed Charles Town to ship directly to traditionally neutral Portugal, defined as below Cape Finisterre, but not to its traditional rivals. About a quarter of the crop went there, and the rest to England, who re-exported two-thirds of what it received to Holland and northern Germany.
Labor was an equally serious problem. The Spanish, always looking for an opportunity to harm the British, were hinting any slaves who made it to Florida were welcome. Men, led by Portuguese-speaking Jemmy, started marching south towards the peninsula from the Stono river in September of 1739, after killing the storekeepers, where they got their arms, and nearby planters known to be harsh to their slaves.
The General Assembly rewrote the slave code and added a high import tax for three years, from 1741 to 1744, just as more people wanted to plant rice.
Towards the end of the war, a London syndicate of Scots born merchants bought Bence island, near modern Sierra Leone. It once had been a base for the Royal African Company, but had lapsed with the monopoly and been destroyed by Africans in 1738.
Henry Laurens became their agent in Charles Town in 1749, and grew especially close to Richard Oswald. He’d been apprenticed to a London merchant in 1744, and returned in 1747 when he was about 23. He received a 10% commission for advertising shipments of slaves, managing sales and buying rice to ship to the syndicate. By 1755, his company, Austen and Laurens, managed 25% of the city’s slave business.
Men ready to imitate the success of others are more vulnerable to advertising than those who experiment for themselves. Merchants played on their Stono Rebellion fears of Angolan or Kongo slaves and of slaves who spoke the same language to promote mixed populations from other parts of Africa. They insinuated all a planter needed was skilled labor to succeed, and advertised slaves came from rice growing areas. It hardly matters if any thing slave traders said was true: men were willing to believe.
These were the years, from 1738 to the revolution, when the argument can be made the knowledge of African slaves was critical to the success of the crop.
The demand for individuals who understood farming may have influenced how the slave trade developed on the western coast of Africa. A decade after the Austrian war ended, England took Sénégal and Gorée from France in 1758 and Bence Island developed as what Hugh Thomas called a "general rendezvous" for independent traders. In these years, nearly 60% of the slaves came from the western coast.
Captives were brought to these and other nearby islands where they were held until the season when winds made voyages west possible. During their time on the islands and in transit, they had to eat.
Judith Carney notes one trader bought 8 tons of rice in 1750 to feed 200 slaves in transit, and another believed 700 to 1,000 tons were needed for the 3,000 to 3,500 captives bought along the Sierra Leone coast. This demand stimulated the expansion of commodity agriculture in the areas near the coast, as demand by caravans had supported farming on the Niger earlier.
The Portuguese had pioneered using captives to grow their own food on Cape Verde islands in the late 1400's, and, Thomas says, the men who managed the captives at Bence island were Portuguese mulattos and Scots or other whites sent by the syndicate. They had the power to ignore the traditional division of labor that dictated women were the ones who tended and harvested the crop, while men did the hard labor of preparing fields. Both men and woman, even those from millet eating areas, arrived in the New World with some awareness of how to grow and mill rice.
The rice people grew in Africa had become more diversified when the Portuguese introduced higher yielding seed from Asian species. Both glaberrima and varieties of sativa were probably used for food in transit, and, Carney suggests, the surpluses of both infiltrated the areas being opened for rice growing in South Carolina where slaves still needed to feed themselves and new planters needed seed.
After rice was milled with mortars and pestles it was put through screens that separated the grains by size. In the 1780's, planter Timothy Ford noted the largest was sold, the middlings were eaten by the planters and the "small rice" given to slaves and livestock. The second was probably broken rice, and the third smaller pieces, Asian grains that hadn’t grown much, and possibly smaller glaberrima.
Back in 1768 when Henry Laurens was criticizing John Champneys for delivering poor quality rice, his complaint had been that, when asked, Champneys refused to have the rice resieved to verify its grade. It was probably broken rice delivered by a planter who had learned how to fool a broker, but hadn’t fully learned how to process rice or hadn’t developed a plantation where the slaves were willing to produce the most marketable product.
Notes: Bence island is also called Bunce island; the War of Austrian Succession is also known as King George’s War.
Barnwell, Joseph W. "Diary of Timothy Ford 1785-1786," South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, 13 October 1912, quoted by Carney.
Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001; details on quantities in transit from Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1998.
Coclanis, Peter A. The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920, 1989; prices.
Collinson, Peter. Letter to Gentleman’s Magazine, 26 May 1766, reprinted by Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, The Rice Paper, January 2007; export quantities.
Eltis, Davd, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas," The American Historical Review 112:Dec 2007; origins on slaves between 1750 and 1775.
Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade, 1997.
A few years before, in 1730, Charles Town exported 41,957 barrels and received 6.29 a hundred weight. A few years later, people believed the number of barrels doubled to 80,000 in 1740. It didn’t matter the price paid was 4.71.
Like the planters in Barbados who ignored their failures to succeed like James Drax, men believed a one-time achievement could become the norm. It had been demonstrated, rice could create a fortune. All that was needed was land, labor, seed rice and the credit to acquire them.
Attempts to produce more rice soon met with failure. Not only did the price fall when quantities increased, but crops failed between 1741 and 1746. Prices hit a low of 2.24 in the 1746.
England had joined Holland to support Austria against France, Saxony, Prussia and Bavaria in their dispute over the right of a woman, Maria Theresa, to assume the Hapsburg throne under Salic law in 1740. The War of Austrian Succession dragged on until 1748, and affected colonies on four continents, the Americas, Africa and southeast Asia.
Not only did shipping costs increase with war, but half the market for rice disappeared. Since 1730, Great Britain had allowed Charles Town to ship directly to traditionally neutral Portugal, defined as below Cape Finisterre, but not to its traditional rivals. About a quarter of the crop went there, and the rest to England, who re-exported two-thirds of what it received to Holland and northern Germany.
Labor was an equally serious problem. The Spanish, always looking for an opportunity to harm the British, were hinting any slaves who made it to Florida were welcome. Men, led by Portuguese-speaking Jemmy, started marching south towards the peninsula from the Stono river in September of 1739, after killing the storekeepers, where they got their arms, and nearby planters known to be harsh to their slaves.
The General Assembly rewrote the slave code and added a high import tax for three years, from 1741 to 1744, just as more people wanted to plant rice.
Towards the end of the war, a London syndicate of Scots born merchants bought Bence island, near modern Sierra Leone. It once had been a base for the Royal African Company, but had lapsed with the monopoly and been destroyed by Africans in 1738.
Henry Laurens became their agent in Charles Town in 1749, and grew especially close to Richard Oswald. He’d been apprenticed to a London merchant in 1744, and returned in 1747 when he was about 23. He received a 10% commission for advertising shipments of slaves, managing sales and buying rice to ship to the syndicate. By 1755, his company, Austen and Laurens, managed 25% of the city’s slave business.
Men ready to imitate the success of others are more vulnerable to advertising than those who experiment for themselves. Merchants played on their Stono Rebellion fears of Angolan or Kongo slaves and of slaves who spoke the same language to promote mixed populations from other parts of Africa. They insinuated all a planter needed was skilled labor to succeed, and advertised slaves came from rice growing areas. It hardly matters if any thing slave traders said was true: men were willing to believe.
These were the years, from 1738 to the revolution, when the argument can be made the knowledge of African slaves was critical to the success of the crop.
The demand for individuals who understood farming may have influenced how the slave trade developed on the western coast of Africa. A decade after the Austrian war ended, England took Sénégal and Gorée from France in 1758 and Bence Island developed as what Hugh Thomas called a "general rendezvous" for independent traders. In these years, nearly 60% of the slaves came from the western coast.
Captives were brought to these and other nearby islands where they were held until the season when winds made voyages west possible. During their time on the islands and in transit, they had to eat.
Judith Carney notes one trader bought 8 tons of rice in 1750 to feed 200 slaves in transit, and another believed 700 to 1,000 tons were needed for the 3,000 to 3,500 captives bought along the Sierra Leone coast. This demand stimulated the expansion of commodity agriculture in the areas near the coast, as demand by caravans had supported farming on the Niger earlier.
The Portuguese had pioneered using captives to grow their own food on Cape Verde islands in the late 1400's, and, Thomas says, the men who managed the captives at Bence island were Portuguese mulattos and Scots or other whites sent by the syndicate. They had the power to ignore the traditional division of labor that dictated women were the ones who tended and harvested the crop, while men did the hard labor of preparing fields. Both men and woman, even those from millet eating areas, arrived in the New World with some awareness of how to grow and mill rice.
The rice people grew in Africa had become more diversified when the Portuguese introduced higher yielding seed from Asian species. Both glaberrima and varieties of sativa were probably used for food in transit, and, Carney suggests, the surpluses of both infiltrated the areas being opened for rice growing in South Carolina where slaves still needed to feed themselves and new planters needed seed.
After rice was milled with mortars and pestles it was put through screens that separated the grains by size. In the 1780's, planter Timothy Ford noted the largest was sold, the middlings were eaten by the planters and the "small rice" given to slaves and livestock. The second was probably broken rice, and the third smaller pieces, Asian grains that hadn’t grown much, and possibly smaller glaberrima.
Back in 1768 when Henry Laurens was criticizing John Champneys for delivering poor quality rice, his complaint had been that, when asked, Champneys refused to have the rice resieved to verify its grade. It was probably broken rice delivered by a planter who had learned how to fool a broker, but hadn’t fully learned how to process rice or hadn’t developed a plantation where the slaves were willing to produce the most marketable product.
Notes: Bence island is also called Bunce island; the War of Austrian Succession is also known as King George’s War.
Barnwell, Joseph W. "Diary of Timothy Ford 1785-1786," South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, 13 October 1912, quoted by Carney.
Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001; details on quantities in transit from Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1998.
Coclanis, Peter A. The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920, 1989; prices.
Collinson, Peter. Letter to Gentleman’s Magazine, 26 May 1766, reprinted by Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, The Rice Paper, January 2007; export quantities.
Eltis, Davd, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas," The American Historical Review 112:Dec 2007; origins on slaves between 1750 and 1775.
Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade, 1997.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
South Carolina - Tools
Settlers in Barbados and Charles Town learned to produce two tropical crops alien to English agriculture, sugar cane and rice. In each case, the first planters had problems when they used familiar methods to plant and harvest, and failed financially until they figured out how to prepare the cane and seed for market.
In the first case, James Drax apparently learned from the experience of Dutch growers from Pernambuco. In the second, scholars have taken Edward Randolph’s comment in 1700 that South Carolina had "now found the true way of raising and husking Rice" to suggest an important role for slaves from Africa in introducing the tall wooden mortar and pestle that resembles a butter churn.
At the time he was commenting on rice, Randolph was the Surveyor General of Customs keeping an eye on exports for the crown. The Charles Town economy was a satellite of the Caribbean, supplying it with cattle and meat. The islands, who shipped their cane to Bristol on England’s west coast, were the primary market for slaves.
Most of the South Carolina slaves came from the West Indies. The Portuguese had sent people from Angola who ate manioc and maize, while the Royal African Company worked the west coast of the continent from modern Sénégal to Togoland where people grew dry rice. The monopoly of the latter was not renewed by William III, who had deposed the Stuarts in 1680. The slave trade was opened in 1698 to the merchants of Bristol.
Statistically, the slave who introduced the mortar and pestle for milling rice would have come from the Caribbean and would have been a Konga, since island planters were more likely to reexport or refuse to buy such slaves. However, since the willingness to cooperate with a slave master was probably rare, the individual, probably a woman, may have been recently imported directly from an African area just being opened by the new slave traders where people grew rice.
The mortar and pestle is used for more than rice in Africa. On the east coast, where the pirates were active, women use the large wooden tool in Tanzania with millet, while it’s used with maize in modern Angola. The transfer of technology from one crop to another is the most conservative form of innovation.
Randolph gave no clue, and the adoption of the technology is not recorded in popular or folk history. Fayrer Hall simply said Henry Woodward "was ignorant for some Years how to clean it. It was soon dispensed over the Province; and by frequent Experiments and Observations they found out Ways of producing and manufacturing it to so great Perfection."
Any inferences about the first mortar and pestle drawn from material culture would probably use examples dated much later. The only suggestive thing about Randolph’s comment is the phrase "the true way." He either was using a rhetorical flourish to say "one that works," which he had been known to do, or had seen or heard about the tool elsewhere.
Randolph was a younger son who used his wife’s connections with the grandson of the first proprietor of New Hampshire, Robert Mason, to ingratiate himself with the government of Charles II after the restoration of 1660. Before he went to New Hampshire in 1676, he had read law at Gray’s Inn during the English civil war and bought lumber for the Commissioners of the Royal Navy. The last took him to Scotland for the Duke of Richmond.
Since he had been sent to New England, where he and his brothers became customs collectors, he would have been in a position to see anything on any ship in the harbor and talk with people informally who could make comments, remembered but not recorded, on customs in Africa. At the time he made his comments, he was shuttling between Charles Town and Bermuda.
We’ll probably never know more than the technology was introduced by a slave woman.
Notes:
Anonymous. "Crude and Curious Inventions at the Centennial Exhibition," The Atlantic Monthly 40:420-430:October 1877; drawings of mortars and pestles from Angola and Madagascar.
Hall, Fayrer. The Importance of the British Plantations in America to this Kingdom, 1731, quoted by A. S. Salley Jr., "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Bulletin of the Historical Commission of South Carolina , no 6, 1919.
Mosha, A. C. "Sorghum and Millet Processing and Utilisation in the Southern Africa Development Coordination Conference Area," available on-line with a photograph of a women using a wooden mortar and pestle in northeast Tanzania.
Urquhart, Alvin W. Patterns of Settlement and Subsistence in Southwestern Angola, 1963; picture of mortar and pestle used to make flour from maize.
In the first case, James Drax apparently learned from the experience of Dutch growers from Pernambuco. In the second, scholars have taken Edward Randolph’s comment in 1700 that South Carolina had "now found the true way of raising and husking Rice" to suggest an important role for slaves from Africa in introducing the tall wooden mortar and pestle that resembles a butter churn.
At the time he was commenting on rice, Randolph was the Surveyor General of Customs keeping an eye on exports for the crown. The Charles Town economy was a satellite of the Caribbean, supplying it with cattle and meat. The islands, who shipped their cane to Bristol on England’s west coast, were the primary market for slaves.
Most of the South Carolina slaves came from the West Indies. The Portuguese had sent people from Angola who ate manioc and maize, while the Royal African Company worked the west coast of the continent from modern Sénégal to Togoland where people grew dry rice. The monopoly of the latter was not renewed by William III, who had deposed the Stuarts in 1680. The slave trade was opened in 1698 to the merchants of Bristol.
Statistically, the slave who introduced the mortar and pestle for milling rice would have come from the Caribbean and would have been a Konga, since island planters were more likely to reexport or refuse to buy such slaves. However, since the willingness to cooperate with a slave master was probably rare, the individual, probably a woman, may have been recently imported directly from an African area just being opened by the new slave traders where people grew rice.
The mortar and pestle is used for more than rice in Africa. On the east coast, where the pirates were active, women use the large wooden tool in Tanzania with millet, while it’s used with maize in modern Angola. The transfer of technology from one crop to another is the most conservative form of innovation.
Randolph gave no clue, and the adoption of the technology is not recorded in popular or folk history. Fayrer Hall simply said Henry Woodward "was ignorant for some Years how to clean it. It was soon dispensed over the Province; and by frequent Experiments and Observations they found out Ways of producing and manufacturing it to so great Perfection."
Any inferences about the first mortar and pestle drawn from material culture would probably use examples dated much later. The only suggestive thing about Randolph’s comment is the phrase "the true way." He either was using a rhetorical flourish to say "one that works," which he had been known to do, or had seen or heard about the tool elsewhere.
Randolph was a younger son who used his wife’s connections with the grandson of the first proprietor of New Hampshire, Robert Mason, to ingratiate himself with the government of Charles II after the restoration of 1660. Before he went to New Hampshire in 1676, he had read law at Gray’s Inn during the English civil war and bought lumber for the Commissioners of the Royal Navy. The last took him to Scotland for the Duke of Richmond.
Since he had been sent to New England, where he and his brothers became customs collectors, he would have been in a position to see anything on any ship in the harbor and talk with people informally who could make comments, remembered but not recorded, on customs in Africa. At the time he made his comments, he was shuttling between Charles Town and Bermuda.
We’ll probably never know more than the technology was introduced by a slave woman.
Notes:
Anonymous. "Crude and Curious Inventions at the Centennial Exhibition," The Atlantic Monthly 40:420-430:October 1877; drawings of mortars and pestles from Angola and Madagascar.
Hall, Fayrer. The Importance of the British Plantations in America to this Kingdom, 1731, quoted by A. S. Salley Jr., "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Bulletin of the Historical Commission of South Carolina , no 6, 1919.
Mosha, A. C. "Sorghum and Millet Processing and Utilisation in the Southern Africa Development Coordination Conference Area," available on-line with a photograph of a women using a wooden mortar and pestle in northeast Tanzania.
Urquhart, Alvin W. Patterns of Settlement and Subsistence in Southwestern Angola, 1963; picture of mortar and pestle used to make flour from maize.
Sunday, August 08, 2010
South Carolina - Drainage and Irrigation
Agricultural economies are forever driven to increase production when trade and improved birth rates lead to larger urban populations. Farmers are continually confronted with managing water, and men (and women) discover and rediscover techniques for adding or removing it.
The methods developed by the Romans were lost, but when textile centers and the great trade fairs began developing in Bruges and Ghent by 1000, demand for wool brought sheep raising parts of England and Scotland into their economic sphere. Severe storms beginning in 1216 destroyed coastal communities, forcing counts in Flanders and Holland to begin protecting their existing land, then reclaiming more.
Wind driven mills appeared in the early 1200's, which D. G. Kirby and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen-Lievonen think may have been introduced by men returning from the Crusades against the Arabs in the near east. However, they say they didn’t become important drainage pumps until larger populations and increased storm problems led to technological innovations in 1570.
Skilled Dutchmen were lured by their neighbors to Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark, then Rochefort and LaRochelle in France. Charles I encouraged Francis, the Duke of Bedford, to drain the fens of southeast England in 1630's, a project continued by Cromwell and Francis’ son William under the direction of Cornelius Vermuyden with Dutch laborers. More projects were undertaken after William of Orange was crowned in 1680.
When Flanders was the center of the textile industry, Dinis of Portugal, who ruled between 1279 and 1325, encouraged trade with the area to create an alternative to the markets of Castile and the Moors. To secure his borders, he introduced new patterns of land ownership and encouraged men to drain the marshes and swamps, where rice was eventually grown. He also cemented a naval alliance with Genoa, who was revolutionizing trade in Bruges.
In northern Italy, landowners of the Po valley began building canals in 1127 that fostered drainage and irrigation schemes. In 1475, the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, sent the first recorded rice from the area to Ercole d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara.
According to Fernand Braudel, the crop was encouraged in Lombardy in the 1500's. They were exporting their surplus to Genoa by 1570.
In 1517, the Ottomans of Turkey had conquered Egypt and demanded rice be sent to Constantinople as part of their annual tribute. It was adopted by the elite, and used by the military on campaigns. In 1600, Venice was eating rice, which they probably bought from the Turks, along with the more traditional wheat, millet and rye.
It takes little for farmers to extrapolate solutions from fragments of information. Portugal introduced reclamation after contact with Flanders. Italy introduced rice after contacts with the levant. In Africa and Madagascar, new varieties of rice were tried, new processing technologies adopted, and new methods for dealing with water created.
When allusions and imagination weren’t enough, men took steps to import knowledge. The Abbasids went from absorbing what the Persians knew to actively saving everything they could from the ancient world. Portugal exploited its contact with Genoa to explore Africa and the world. Everyone hired Dutch engineers and laborers.
Population growth, both natural and from new market towns, created necessity. Trade simplified finding solutions because it revitalized cultures grown comfortable in isolation. Rice and the techniques to grow it expanded when dynamic responses to life replaced static ones.
Notes:
Adshead, Samuel Adrian Miles. Material Culture in Europe and China, 1400-1800: The Rise of Consumerism, 1997.
Braudel, Fernand. La Méditerrane et le Monde Méditerranéan à l’Euopque de Philippe II, 1966 edition, translated as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Sian Reynolds, 1972.
Dutra, Francis A. "Dinis, King of Portugal" in E. Michael Gerli and Samuel G. Armistead, Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, 2003.
Kirby, D. G. and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen-Lievonen. The Baltic and the North Seas, 2000. The major innovation was the movable cap that allowed the mill’s sails to follow changes in the direction of the wind.
Pregill, Philip and Nancy Volkma. Landscapes in History: Design and Planning in the Eastern and Western Traditions, 1999.
The methods developed by the Romans were lost, but when textile centers and the great trade fairs began developing in Bruges and Ghent by 1000, demand for wool brought sheep raising parts of England and Scotland into their economic sphere. Severe storms beginning in 1216 destroyed coastal communities, forcing counts in Flanders and Holland to begin protecting their existing land, then reclaiming more.
Wind driven mills appeared in the early 1200's, which D. G. Kirby and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen-Lievonen think may have been introduced by men returning from the Crusades against the Arabs in the near east. However, they say they didn’t become important drainage pumps until larger populations and increased storm problems led to technological innovations in 1570.
Skilled Dutchmen were lured by their neighbors to Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark, then Rochefort and LaRochelle in France. Charles I encouraged Francis, the Duke of Bedford, to drain the fens of southeast England in 1630's, a project continued by Cromwell and Francis’ son William under the direction of Cornelius Vermuyden with Dutch laborers. More projects were undertaken after William of Orange was crowned in 1680.
When Flanders was the center of the textile industry, Dinis of Portugal, who ruled between 1279 and 1325, encouraged trade with the area to create an alternative to the markets of Castile and the Moors. To secure his borders, he introduced new patterns of land ownership and encouraged men to drain the marshes and swamps, where rice was eventually grown. He also cemented a naval alliance with Genoa, who was revolutionizing trade in Bruges.
In northern Italy, landowners of the Po valley began building canals in 1127 that fostered drainage and irrigation schemes. In 1475, the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, sent the first recorded rice from the area to Ercole d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara.
According to Fernand Braudel, the crop was encouraged in Lombardy in the 1500's. They were exporting their surplus to Genoa by 1570.
In 1517, the Ottomans of Turkey had conquered Egypt and demanded rice be sent to Constantinople as part of their annual tribute. It was adopted by the elite, and used by the military on campaigns. In 1600, Venice was eating rice, which they probably bought from the Turks, along with the more traditional wheat, millet and rye.
It takes little for farmers to extrapolate solutions from fragments of information. Portugal introduced reclamation after contact with Flanders. Italy introduced rice after contacts with the levant. In Africa and Madagascar, new varieties of rice were tried, new processing technologies adopted, and new methods for dealing with water created.
When allusions and imagination weren’t enough, men took steps to import knowledge. The Abbasids went from absorbing what the Persians knew to actively saving everything they could from the ancient world. Portugal exploited its contact with Genoa to explore Africa and the world. Everyone hired Dutch engineers and laborers.
Population growth, both natural and from new market towns, created necessity. Trade simplified finding solutions because it revitalized cultures grown comfortable in isolation. Rice and the techniques to grow it expanded when dynamic responses to life replaced static ones.
Notes:
Adshead, Samuel Adrian Miles. Material Culture in Europe and China, 1400-1800: The Rise of Consumerism, 1997.
Braudel, Fernand. La Méditerrane et le Monde Méditerranéan à l’Euopque de Philippe II, 1966 edition, translated as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Sian Reynolds, 1972.
Dutra, Francis A. "Dinis, King of Portugal" in E. Michael Gerli and Samuel G. Armistead, Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, 2003.
Kirby, D. G. and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen-Lievonen. The Baltic and the North Seas, 2000. The major innovation was the movable cap that allowed the mill’s sails to follow changes in the direction of the wind.
Pregill, Philip and Nancy Volkma. Landscapes in History: Design and Planning in the Eastern and Western Traditions, 1999.
Sunday, August 01, 2010
South Carolina - Trade
Trade, historically, has fostered economic growth and then expanded to feed the needs it generated.
Africa was apparently a world of small communities who traded among themselves before Arab conquerors fanned out after the Sunni Umayyads deposed the established Moslem powers in 661. The Damascan caliphate spread to Egypt in 670 and across northern Africa to Spain in 711, then down to Mauritania in 734.
The Umayyads were deposed by the Shia Abbasids in 750, who moved the Moslem capital to Baghdad and eventually established a trade network that spread from the Umayyad retreat in Spain across northern Africa and the middle east through northern India to the Tarim basin of western China.
Bernard Lewis has found the earliest reference to rice comes from the conquest of the Basra area on the Persian frontier by Moslem tribesmen in the 600's. They tested the unknown grain as food after a horse that had eaten some didn’t die.
It probably became more common as a luxury among the elite after the Abbasids developed Basra as an intellectual center. At some time it was introduced to Egypt, then Spain. The Ishmali Fatimids, who deposed the Abbasids in Egypt in 909, spread north to Sicily, taking rice with them.
Arab traders began moving down the east African coast to Manda island off Kenya in the 800's. Soon after items carved from chlorite schist quarried on the northwest coast of Madagascar appeared in east Africa. The success of a Yemeni clan at Mogadishu in the middle 1100's, brought traders from Shiraz to Kilwa island off Tanzania in the late 1100's.
In the early 1300's, the Mahdali, an Ishmali clan from southern Aden, took over Kilwa and then the east African gold trade. Arab traders weren’t as interested in developing new markets as they were in redirecting the existing trade in gold; urban centers emerged as a consequence, abetted by the availability of surplus food to support urban populations and supply travelers.
Madagascar was drawn into the web of trade. Iharana, where Chinese export China was found in graves from the late 1300's, developed in the northeast as another source for three-legged bowls made from metamorphic rock. The growing port of Aden, with its community of Indian merchants from Gujarat, imported rice from Kilwa, which Richard Gray believes could only have come from Madagascar.
Mande speakers near the headwaters of the western branch of the Niger in west Africa grew glaberrima rice, which Judith Carney believes made possible the earliest sub-Saharan kingdom of Ghana.
Desert caravans, guided by the Sanhaja, linked the peoples of the Mediterranean with the savannah of the Mande, each of whom seems to have remained isolated from one another. The revitalizing Sunni Almoravids from Mauritania attacked Ghana’s main city, Awdaghost, in 1055, before they took Córdova in 1102, setting off the reconquest.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the southern Mande, the Malinke, moved along the Niger to establish the towns of Mali along the bend of the river. Timbukto became a center of learning for the Songhai empire to the northeast in the 1300's.
The exposure to Islam and the requisite trips to Mecca through Egypt, at least among the elite, provided the opportunity for people from the Sahel and savannah to travel to areas with different irrigation systems and different varieties of rice.
Notes:
Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001.
Garlake, Peter. The Kingdoms of Africa, 1978.
Gray, Richard. "Southern Africa and Madagascar" in The Cambridge History of Africa: From c.1600 to c.1790, volume 4, 1975, edited by Richard Gray.
Lewis, Bernard. The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, 1995.
Africa was apparently a world of small communities who traded among themselves before Arab conquerors fanned out after the Sunni Umayyads deposed the established Moslem powers in 661. The Damascan caliphate spread to Egypt in 670 and across northern Africa to Spain in 711, then down to Mauritania in 734.
The Umayyads were deposed by the Shia Abbasids in 750, who moved the Moslem capital to Baghdad and eventually established a trade network that spread from the Umayyad retreat in Spain across northern Africa and the middle east through northern India to the Tarim basin of western China.
Bernard Lewis has found the earliest reference to rice comes from the conquest of the Basra area on the Persian frontier by Moslem tribesmen in the 600's. They tested the unknown grain as food after a horse that had eaten some didn’t die.
It probably became more common as a luxury among the elite after the Abbasids developed Basra as an intellectual center. At some time it was introduced to Egypt, then Spain. The Ishmali Fatimids, who deposed the Abbasids in Egypt in 909, spread north to Sicily, taking rice with them.
Arab traders began moving down the east African coast to Manda island off Kenya in the 800's. Soon after items carved from chlorite schist quarried on the northwest coast of Madagascar appeared in east Africa. The success of a Yemeni clan at Mogadishu in the middle 1100's, brought traders from Shiraz to Kilwa island off Tanzania in the late 1100's.
In the early 1300's, the Mahdali, an Ishmali clan from southern Aden, took over Kilwa and then the east African gold trade. Arab traders weren’t as interested in developing new markets as they were in redirecting the existing trade in gold; urban centers emerged as a consequence, abetted by the availability of surplus food to support urban populations and supply travelers.
Madagascar was drawn into the web of trade. Iharana, where Chinese export China was found in graves from the late 1300's, developed in the northeast as another source for three-legged bowls made from metamorphic rock. The growing port of Aden, with its community of Indian merchants from Gujarat, imported rice from Kilwa, which Richard Gray believes could only have come from Madagascar.
Mande speakers near the headwaters of the western branch of the Niger in west Africa grew glaberrima rice, which Judith Carney believes made possible the earliest sub-Saharan kingdom of Ghana.
Desert caravans, guided by the Sanhaja, linked the peoples of the Mediterranean with the savannah of the Mande, each of whom seems to have remained isolated from one another. The revitalizing Sunni Almoravids from Mauritania attacked Ghana’s main city, Awdaghost, in 1055, before they took Córdova in 1102, setting off the reconquest.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the southern Mande, the Malinke, moved along the Niger to establish the towns of Mali along the bend of the river. Timbukto became a center of learning for the Songhai empire to the northeast in the 1300's.
The exposure to Islam and the requisite trips to Mecca through Egypt, at least among the elite, provided the opportunity for people from the Sahel and savannah to travel to areas with different irrigation systems and different varieties of rice.
Notes:
Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001.
Garlake, Peter. The Kingdoms of Africa, 1978.
Gray, Richard. "Southern Africa and Madagascar" in The Cambridge History of Africa: From c.1600 to c.1790, volume 4, 1975, edited by Richard Gray.
Lewis, Bernard. The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, 1995.
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